I tend to think of writing as a more collaborative project than I think some people do.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that.

It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.

I think that we're all always just working on finding how that balance functions for us, given today's circumstances.

Always acknowledge your daily blessings with a grateful heart, but never dare to be content with them. Your true potential in life is limitless.

If you ever want to see how small you are in the plan of God, just stand at the edge of an ocean.

Truth like the burgeoning of a bulb under the soil however deeply sown will make its way to the light.

Wrangler butts drive me nuts.

The first thing you do is teach the person to feel that the vision is very important and nearly impossible. That draws out the drive in the winner.

You should love yourself.

You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.

The ground that a good man treads is hallowed.

All the truly great stand-ups say, "I go onstage, and I work on jokes. The inspiration will happen while I'm doing my work." To me, in the end, the surest thing is work.

The future is always changing. If we had no choices, there'd be no point in living.