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.

Even as a kid I wasn't, like, a natural entertainer, where I would gather everyone around me and then sing or something at family parties.

I do absolutely nothing, actually, believe it or not. People will probably hate me for saying that, but I guess I'm one of those lucky horrible people who, no matter what I eat, I don't gain a pound. My whole family is just like that. They're all skinny and tall, and I guess, so am I.

It's a very, very fascinating story for me, cause it's about a man who's been doing bad; bad things. And he's a father of four children in parochial school, he's a lieutenant of detectives, but he's in conflict with himself and with trying to do what's right.

We still have our home in Seattle. The kids are there. The grandkids are there.