My mother believed in curses, karma, good luck, bad luck, feng shui. Her amorphous set of beliefs showed me you can pick and choose the qualities of your philosophy, based on what works for you.

For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By 'voice,' I don't mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.

A good education is that which prepares us for our future sphere of action and makes us contented with that situation in life in which God, in his infinite mercy, has seen fit to place us, to be perfectly resigned to our lot in life, whatever it may be.

I never went to school for writing, never took a writing class, but when you're in a room with David Simon and Ed Burns and Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, and they're going over something you've written, you learn what works and what doesn't.

I loved growing up in Canada. It's a great place to grow up because - well, at least where I grew up - it's very multicultural. There's also good health care and a good education system.

I think education is both using and improving knowledge and that changes the whole picture.