I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.

Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.

Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?

I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

She's right, Kate's right, I'm right and you're wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead— chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong?

You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward.

Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life.

If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite

I've cried over string arrangements.

There's just a few people that call themselves stars can actually sit down with a guitar and sing you a song.

The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.

I play football, and most football players are camera shy. We just want to be left alone; we just want to stick to what we do.