I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

Love is the outlaw's duty.

If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.

Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.

Talk between women friends is always therapy.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

I wish I had more time to write.

I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up.

Gratitude, the ability to count your blessings, is the ultimate way to connect with the heart.

Eventually, I manage to cheer Mum up by allowing her to go through my wardrobe and criticize all my clothes...

Resentment’s appetite is never fulfilled.

There is no personal charm so great as the charm of a cheerful temperament.

When you feel your child truly loves you back, it makes you wish you had kissed your parents more.

The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.

A winning effort begins with preparation.

Jane had that happy disposition which would like to imagine that every one really wishes the well-being of his neighbour and struggles, though sometimes rather disastrously, to help him towards it.

I don't want realism. I want magic!