One of the things I strive for is realism. I need to be as real as possible in the dilemmas my characters face.

You have an audience that is fairly well grounded in the real world. You serve them and yourself best by making everything as real as possible.

Anyone who tells you they don't need to rewrite, they're usually the ones who need it worst.

I love meeting fans. They're always fun, they always have good things to say, smart questions to ask, and plenty of ideas for me to explore in the future.

Every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there’s such a thing as love, and whether it’s redemptive, become vastly different. And the structures with which you can communicate those dilemmas, or have characters struggle with them, seem to become appropriate and then inappropriate again and so on.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.