I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.

With grace you can realise your goals.

Sometimes you have to choose between a bunch of wrong choices and no right ones. You just have to choose which wrong choices feels the least wrong.

The best path through life is the highway.

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;The wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

When friends asked me, Can we help? I'd say, Not unless you can alter time, speed up the harvest or teleport me off this rock. I used that line from Star Wars.

Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.” “Yeah,” said the voice from under the table, “you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.

I think he loved us equally, but differently.

I've always been a morning person, and what I don't get done in the morning I really don't get done at all.

A great fortune enslaves its owner.

Sister Simplicitie! Sing, sing a song to me,-- Sing me to sleep! Some legend low and long, Slow as the summer song Of the dull Deep.