Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.

I'm me. I'm just out there being myself. I like having fun. But at the same time, I bring everybody together. So I'm really -- or I try to be -- like the glue of the team.

The Internet is a fantastic, strange place where you can write an open letter and be reasonably assured that people are going to read it.

I'm not on a diet. And it's funny cause people go 'Well, then why do you drink diet soda?' So I can eat regular cake.

autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.

Stay in the middle,don't get pushed to the side,every chance that's worth taking,is a chance worth the fight

I'm enjoying simplifying things.

I'm half Scotch-Irish on both sides, and when I lose my temper-brother, I go.

The only goal is the decency of means.

Freedom is such a precious commodity. Yet sometimes the freest of people devalue it the most.