Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors and their toes are going to curl up.

There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.

There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.

...crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.

Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life, but retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product, in almost every case.

My father had osteomyelitis-his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder ... . But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all.

I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.

He turned to face the long, shadowy hall. There was no turning back now. Unless, of course, he decided to turn back.

Nothing arouses ambition so much as the trumpet clang of another's fame.

I think you go through a period as a teenager of being quite cool and unaffected by things.

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Men aren't as strong and capable as we are. We're machines.

The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.

Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.

When I was really young, I got moonstruck by Moonstruck.