A small town has as many eyes as a fly

She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

Let me fly, let me see things that are hidden from other eyes.

Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.

Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.

My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

Words on the page are never prisoners of the page

How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.

To go somewhere, start going.

Be careful what you tell me. You could end up in my next novel.

You have to forgive yourself for your past mistakes, and you have to forgive those that hurt you for what they did to you, or you're never going to fully move on.

I'm not going to give a courtesy gift to a person who's going to win, and I'm not going to give a sympathy gift to a person who's going to lose.

Tommy's [Gamble] an East Coast guy, so he kind of talks fast and in quick statements and phrases, so I understood him and he understood me, and we just hit it off.

When you write you have to reside in the unknown for as long as possible.

Thy key to being able to communicate and benefit from each other is to truly see you own value. That will allow you to see it more clearly in others.

And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.

Good intentions are not enough; commitment and sacrifice are necessary.

The state is a vast enterprise for declaring all sorts of things legal for itself that would be illegal for us.