There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

You will do great and terrible things, Bethany Rudan. Just make sure you know the difference before you choose to act. And look to the boy, the tracker. He anchors you.

Indifference and inaction must always pay a penalty.

Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives at it.

A lot of people have no access to beauty. When I was growing up, my mother had only a few pretty things to look at.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

Sometimes, at a certain point, the painting seems to have painted itself without my help - what I have called the 'eureka' moment when a sudden daring intervention has worked a miracle.

Good Government is not intrusive the people are hardly aware of it; the next best is felt yet loved; then comes that which is known and feared; the worst government is hated.

Know which officials are voted into office and which are appointed, and by whom.

One should just be able to play a perfect game.

Love is the only disease that makes you feel better.