It’s never too late. I know you can feel sometimes as if your best creative days are behind you, that without the furtive, twitchy energy of youth, nothing you write will be good enough, or that the whole process of looking for a publisher and then promoting your book you will just exhaust you the way the idea of raising little children again seems like signing up for bootcamp.

A good story, I decided, shouldn’t preserve anything; it should carry us forward.

The circularity of our journey often nagged at me once we’d returned home. What were we doing with ourselves anyway? Where were we going?

I had to break myself of a habit once I became self-employed. If I wanted, I could chuck every supposed responsibility and spend the entire day watching reruns of Seinfeld. I liked Seinfeld, but this doesn’t actually sound like a fun way to spend a day.

If you’re a writer, every time you sit down to work you choose – whether you acknowledge it or not – to face the unknown. That’s the only place you’ll find your story.

I never want to be late, or rude, or bored, or angry, or tired, or scared, or depressed, but I do love to tell stories.

Only you know the ending to your story, and only you know who you love and what you love – and love, of course, the is most creative force in the universe.

It’s an inside-out world we live in. I know it doesn’t seem that way most of the time. Well, maybe it does when you’re writing.

If I’m smart, when I start a book, I don’t talk to anyone about it except my wife and my agent, and even then I don’t tell my agent anything about the book except that I’m writing it.

You know how it is when you’re in the zone. It doesn’t matter how long you’re in it, you know when you are, and it doesn’t get any better than that. It feels great, whether you’re writing or talking to a friend or dreaming of a new idea. You’re not worried about the future or mulling over the past, you’re just interested in what’s coming next.