No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.

He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again. I pictured smacking him in the face.

But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom...

I'm a typical college girl; I love to shop and gossip with my roommates about boys and whatnot.

When we make mistakes they call it evil

If you truly want to make an impact on the world, you can and you will.

I didn't want to be a director for hire. It really just took me a long time to learn how to direct and to feel up to the job.

I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus.

He that will write well in any tongue must follow this counsel of Aristotle: to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do.

Mister, we deal in lead.

Who does not believe his first passion eternal?