What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

Hypocrites, ’ replied Cale, ‘I’ve come across a lot of them recently. I mean by that I understand now how many of them there are.

the abstract reveals after a second

The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell. The lovely thin paper with a bit of matress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted.

I've got to make sure I'm keeping weight on.

We're all born, and if you're going to live to be elderly, you'll have gone through a life journey different than anyone else's. It's unique to you, but you'll have some common themes.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

God may have created the world in six days, but while he was resting on the seventh, Beelzebub popped up and did this place.

There is but one kind of love; God is love, and all his creatures derive theirs from his; only it is modified by the different degrees of intelligence in different beings and creatures.

Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, and you're the one I need

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.