Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

I think you can only be truly mad at someone you really love.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.

And at the end of the season you can only do as well as what you have done

My ideas are not meant to suggest dreams or reality, but a surreal quality.

That old berk," muttered Aberforth, taking another swig of mead. "Thought the sun shone out of my brother's every orifice, he did.

We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.

Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms.

I'm not a humanitarian, I'ma hell-raiser.

We live in an unsafe world.