I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

Ugly or beautiful, it is the little creatures that make the world go round. We should celebrate and appreciated them in all their wonderful diversity.

I sat up in bed my body covered in sweat, and aching from tossing and turning that I had done. I knew it had been another nightmare. They had plagued my nights since the day I took Aleksander’s life.

Wealth and greed are the roots of all evils

When your resources are focused on what has been you cannot create all that can still be.

I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

Sometimes I have to remind myself, that on my worst day I live like somebody on their greatest

I grew up in a military family. I was moved around from school to school, so people aren't always the most welcoming to new girls in school.

If you're not having doubt, you're not pushing the boundaries far enough.