We do an epically bad job of acknowledging one another’s work and checking our sources.
Books are like tweets, except longer.
The joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.
I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.
I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.
I realized during my time as a chaplain that I didn’t want to be a minister.
I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It’s my favorite city.
I’ve read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you’re a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.
Videogame players essentially choose whether to win the game or to die heroically. There’s a certain glory in both.
Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.
I always wondered if there was a purpose to the universe, if there was a plan, if there was some sort of organizing factor, hopefully that I played a role in.
I am still bowled over by this great young adult novel by David Levithan called ‘Every Day,’ which is about a character with no gender or body who wakes up every day in the body of a different person. It’s a really impressive execution of a really great premise.
I don’t decide where I live. My wife decides. She’s a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.
I don’t think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.
I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are ‘realistic novels,’ but they can also be fantastical, so it’s nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.
I love making YouTube videos. I love Tumblr, I love Twitter. I love talking with people I find interesting about stuff I find interesting, and the Internet is a great way to do that.
I think it’s crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn’t. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.
I know what happens a the end of falling-landing.
That’s how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn’t work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.