The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me.

Some suggestions for you :

When people ask for book recommendations, I say this: Do some math. If you read one book every week for the rest of your life, and if you're lucky enough to live for 50 more years, you're only going to get to 2,600 books.

My ribs ache from all the texts I'll never make time for.

My goals aren't really commercial success.

My mom is a science teacher in high school, and one of my brothers works in optics at Bell Labs, and so I was always surrounded by it.

Every artist wants an audience, and it's incredible to me how books take on a life of their own and reach people whom you could never meet. That's what got me interested in writing in the first place.

I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us - you don't go into debt to get an MFA. It's not like getting an MBA - you're not going to buy yourself out.

Great writers probably shouldn't be ranked, at least not by me.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.

'Research,' for me, is a big word that encompasses a lot of different activities, all of them based around curiosity. Research is traveling to places, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating one's memories. Research is walking around Hamburg with a notebook.

I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I'm like, 'What do you mean he's dead?' We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

I grew up in Cleveland, so my heart got attached at a young age to the freight train of sadness that is Cleveland sports.

You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull.