"My father wanted me to work with him in his company, an import/export firm, and to that end I lived in Japan for a couple of years. But it didn’t work out. It didn’t make me happy and the truth is I wasn’t that good at it. I wouldn’t have been a good businessman. I tried. So I quit — or, if he were alive and you could ask him, fired — and started writing. He wasn’t for it but then it’s hard to support a child in an endeavor for which he has shown absolutely no promise. My mother loved the idea of it because being a writer is such a romantic idea and because it hurt my father, and if he was hurt she was happy."

"I think a lot of people default to Jesus when something inexplicable happens. I write things I didn’t know I was capable of writing, and sometimes that feels like magic. It isn’t; it’s just me. A similar thing happens when a tornado blows someone’s house away, but their cat is found unscathed in an oak tree: God must have been looking out for Pooky. We’re hard-wired to do this, I think, because we’ve been doing it since the beginning."

"I thought I was a much better writer then than I do now. I loved the stories I was coming up with, and was really amazed I could put enough sentences together to make a paragraph. It was like magic, seeing the little black marks all come together. I sound like I’m making fun of myself but I’m not. If a writer writes I was a writer. I couldn’t see very far beyond that though. The pure pleasure of invention, of making stuff up, clouded over everything else. I couldn’t tell the difference between a good story and a good story told well. I wrote three hundred pages about a pair of billionaire twins, each weighing just over 500 pounds, who ‘rent’ the mistress of one of their friends. What did I think was going to come of that? Nothing much did. And I wrote a few other books equally as promising. As I wrote I was learning to write (having not gone to school) and I was learning what not to write as well. I also finally figured out that I was writing the kind of books I thought other people wanted to read, not the kind I wanted to write. That’s when Big Fish happened, and why it was a breakthrough for me."

"Teaching undergraduates is a much different than teaching graduate or post-graduate students. My job is to foster an appreciation for the art of writing. Showing a student what’s behind the curtain, so he’ll at least be able to see and appreciate these things when he reads a book. If he chooses to write himself — and of course, very few undergraduates pursue writing beyond this level — he knows some of the very basic devices used to creating a compelling story. Rarely does a student leave our program homogenized: even if that were something we wanted to do, we just don’t have them long enough."

• A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998)
• Ray in Reverse (2000)
• The Watermelon King (2003)
• O Great Rosenfeld! a.k.a. O Great Rosenfeld!: In Which Our Esteemed Leader, Rosenfeld, and His Tribe of 33 and 1/2 Followers Find Themselves Trapped Between a Bunch of Very Dangerous ... After Sally, the Most Beautiful Woman (2005)
• O Great Rosenfeld! Part the 2 a.k.a. O Great Rosenfeld! Part the 2: In Which Wilson Learns to Cartwheel and All is Seems Lost Only to be Saved at Very Nearly the Last Second by Love (2005)
• Off the Map (2005)
• Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician (2007)