Through career fumbles and life changes, she supported me. Through shattered dreams and hopes almost-realized, she supported me too.

It’s not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, “Okay, world, today I’m gonna spaz.

She also understood there was a hole in her heart where her son should be, that she was a wicked, selfish woman for wishing him back.

She was no stripper with a heart of gold, that was for sure. A heart of steel, more like.

We didn’t want to admit it then, but we were friends. Best friends.

You’re saying, “What the hell am I gonna do with her?” You’re saying, “Shit, did she take her pills?” You’re saying, “Once upon a time, I used to have a little girl.

Writing is a solitary business. It’s just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something…or something.

A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.

Okay, I’ll just jump right out and say it. I have anxiety issues.

Just five minutes, God, I chant like some hostage negotiator on the brink of a resolution. Five minutes alone. Please, please. Please.

Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.

It rewrites the contract, I'd read somewhere. Your self's no longer central. This thing comes out of you and drags half your soul along after it like a blanket.

I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.

What signifies the ladder, provided one rise and attain the end?

I believe that one of the characteristics of the human race, possibly the one that is primarily responsible for its course of evolution, is that it has grown by creatively responding to failure.

I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.

It was not enough. It was too much. It was everything.

I just want to do what I do best, and that's fight. I love it.

I'm running for office, for Pete's sake, I can't have illegals.

You never work for someone else. The truth is someone is paying you to work for yourself.