When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.

Smiling is confusing, she thought. This is why I don’t do it.

Months are different in college, especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they're like dog months.

I don't want to do anything. I don't even want to start this day because then I'll just be expected to finish it.

Emergency dance party--go away.

I don't like hello. It makes me sound like I have dementia, like I've never heard a phone ring before and I don't know what's supposed to happen next. Hello?

You flirt with everything." She could tell that her eyes were popping-- her eyeballs actually felt cold around the edges. "You flirt with old people and babies and everybody in between.

She was tired of being the one who cried.

You've got an empire to run, I'm just your arm candy.

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky.

Courageous people feel the same fear everyone else does, they just decide to not be afraid anymore.

Those of us who had a perfectly happy childhood should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties.

I really think that people must understand that what you really think and feel and believe is what you're going to create in your world.

If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.

I wear tweed jackets and button-down shirts. I am a 1955 graduate of Harvard University who drives a 1968 Mercedes.

Well, I'm kinda like George Carlin. I think that there ought to be a time where everybody should have all the drugs they want and there'd be nobody in charge, sort of like... now!

You are the human clay," Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. "And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece.

Geez, I just played cricket because I loved the game. I never thought about it much, never really had any formal coaching.