Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!

Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.

And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...

When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

Humility is the freedom to stop trying to be what we're not, or pretending to be what we're not, and accepting our 'appropriate smallness.

Having a pleasant time can extend a long period of time to have a fun time.

I can only control my actions, not their reactions, " Senna replied. "But I have to live with both.

I was in the back of the book [in the The Reporter] doing music.

Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

A liar must have a good memory. -Mendacem oportet esse memorem

In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.

I'll accept commissions from anyone who isn't frightened by my proposals.

The only time I can really relax is up a tree or somewhere outside. I love being outside.

I'm free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.