Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

He traveled in order to come home.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

Life's a one way ticket

You're a machine, " she murmured when he swept kisses across her jaw and over her cheek. "Only for you, sweetheart.

I find myself maybe just pushing myself to create characters that are a little outside the box, and if that sort of gets the critics talking, then I can take it.

I think there's a great beauty to having problems. That's one of the ways we learn.

I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.

No one, but no one, is equal, or ever will be. Elvis was and is supreme.

Even if it's other people, like on MySpace pages, we're just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we're in.

It's not fair to say that Congress spends money like a drunk sailor. At least the sailor is spending his own money!

Those who prepare for war get it.