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.

I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family.

By no stretch of the imagination can you describe me as a Wall Street lawyer. If you're going to do that, you'd have to say that 7,500 people who work here in Southwestern Pennsylvania for the Bank of New York Mellon with good family jobs are Wall Streeters.

As parents, you want to try to mitigate your children's pain.

I think growing up in a big family taught me a lot of problem solving and how to share and compromise, and that's been helpful in my marriage.