If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.

Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

Even in death, may you be triumphant

Silence and indifference would not take you anywhere at the end of the day.

He who forsakes his own community and joins another perishes as the king who embraces an unrighteous path.

There's a problem with wounded birds, Cassie," Connor said. "Either they fly away from you one day, or else they never get better. They stay hurt no matter what you do.

I always looked really young. I matured pretty late.

I'm a little frail girl, but I like being tied up, blindfolded and gagged so you can't move.

All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.

But I marry myself. I take my fate as within.

How do you grow up in the shadow of a guy - I want to talk about the movie in a second - but how do you grow up in the shadow of a guy who really is a legend in his own time?