Connecticut is in my blood.

The greatest griefs are silent.

With destruction comes renovation.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out.

The evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.

A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

Love stories are probably all Ive ever been able to write or want to write.

Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write.

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

Hardest thing: creating something out of nothing - the first draft is torturous.

Dialogue comes naturally to me and I can hear the characters' voices in the scenes.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

I need to get lost and sometimes my characters lead me to places I don't expect to go.

Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference

The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

I'm a very rooted person. I grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, I still live in Connecticut.

People waste their happiness - that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.

What if I don’t like adventure? Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.

I am a plodder, I make an appointment with my computer everyday and I have no idea where I am going.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

I write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.

I try to stick with what moves me or teaches me about myself, same thing I hope the novels do for others.

Eastern Connecticut is very different from Western; we're more liverwurst than pâté, more bowling than polo.

Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

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