I'm weary of the battle. But a tired fighter can still be a fighter.

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.

It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.

Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

Affection is one of the most neglected words in the English language, that people throw the word love around like confetti when they mean affection.

In retrospect, crappy chemicals in my brain were working overtime, driving me to destroy myself, like that thing that makes lemmings throw them¬selves over a cliff.

Love is when you let someone be the way they are.

For some reason if we hear 100 praises and one criticism, we focus on that one hurtful thing.

The only kind of movement you could make in the Navy was to be a platoon leader or one of those kinds of things as you got more senior in your Navy career.

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

I really enjoy working on small films.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

After all this, I won't start to hate you.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

There is a difference between CAN'T and WON'T. 'Can't' can be the result of lacking physical ability, but 'won't' has more to do with attitude.