You spin the wheel enough times and maybe you come out on top.

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.

I missed a couple of gallops with her so she isn't right at her top. But she is going well.

You touch the curb and try not to get too much wheel spin off of there in second gear. It feels like you have a big magnet in your pocket pulling you up towards the wall right here.

A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.