I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.

In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn't get.

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

The stars are always up in the sky...then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.

Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.

From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.

The image of God is in every human

This body, this body holding me. Be my reminder here that I am not alone in this body, this body holding me. Feeling eternal. All this pain is an illusion.

The prayers of Christians are in vain if they do not plan any corresponding actions

You can make anything by writing

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias

The world isn't purposeful. It isn't ruled by reason. The world wants to play. Fashion queens have always aroused more interest than future generations and their fate.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

The increase in the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are having an effect. Our ability to predict that effect is very limited.

There's something about music that makes me feel like a different person, that feels like an escape.