It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

I love you the way a knife loves a heart, the way a bomb loves a crowd, the way your mother warned you about, essentially.

The breath of life is unlimited grace.

The beautiful remains so in ugly surroundings.

To me to write well is to battle stereotypes. To write well is to create three-dimensional characters that seem human.

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

It's funny how people want to sometimes think that Young and Beautiful film is about all adolescents, but it's just the case of one girl. It doesn't mean all the adolescents are like that, of course.

A woman's sense of self is defined through her feelings and the quality of her relationships.

Clearness is the ornament of deep thought.

It is no longer enough to point out what we don't like, we have to work out 'What sort of society do we want?

The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.