Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.

The world's not getting any stranger.We are!

how much does a thought weigh?

I think I've only done one horror movie, Psycho III. That was a walk in the park compared to a romantic comedy.

I've always had my own style, I've always been different. I don't like to wear anything that anyone else is wearing because it's very important for me to make a statement.

The tiniest criticism or put-down soaks into me and lies in my heart like a stone. Sometimes that spurs me on to work harder, but sometimes it just fills me up with sadness.

No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.

Time, like money, is measured by our needs.

Our journey is demanding enough that the need for reassurance as well as reminders is constant.

The seeds for the Descendants were planted in Uncanny X-Force, but I always conceived them as being bigger than just that book.

We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges