I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

I never went dancing again.

If you practise deceit it will burrow down into dark places and change you. Spoken by Boaz to his daughter, Star.

The passions are the only orators which always persuade.

You must love and care for yourself because that's when the best comes out.

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

We in the west walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the cold war and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again there will be consequences.

I think that we're foolhardy to not be engaging in federal funding of stem-cell research in the most aggressive way we possibly can.

I don't like standard beauty - there is no beauty without strangeness.

Suicide is part murder, revenge on those who hurt you, just as murder is part suicide, for a murderer knows he risks losing his life.

What is odious but . . . people . . . who toast their feet on the register. . . .