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We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.

No day-to-day mishaps or indignities can really compromise your sense of self after you've survived a deep tragedy.

There is the natural tendency that all of us are vulnerable to, to deny unpleasant realities and to look for any excuse to push them away and resolve to think about them another day long in the future.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.

Personality is reduced and deformed with depleted thoughts and stagnant mind.