When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them

Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.

Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?

I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

Cats are absolute individuals, with their own ideas about everything, including the people they own.

Keep reading books, stay in school. I encourage kids to read as much as they can, I challenge you to read a book every two weeks, like I try to.

As a fanboy myself, one of the fun things about the gig has been every time I get a new script, I get to find out more about his day - to-day life and what goes on and what his relationships are.

Everybody will always find some way of diminishing your work, but it's all a lie!

No nation now sets forth to despoil another upon the avowed ground that it desires the spoils.

Not to discover weakness is The Artifice of strength.

Strong leaders are harassed, imprisoned or assassinated, which are great deterrents if you want to silence a firebrand and suppress a revolt.

My arias make me take off as if I were on a trampoline.

I think it's the support from our parents. They want to see us succeed and do what we want to do.

I do genre films because I like them, or because I need the money.