When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority.

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book.

I would love it if my book was considered chick-lit or a beach read. That would be great. People would buy my book.

I think that people are generally really terrible at being ambassadors of their own work.

I don't think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer.

Women especially are trained to protect other people's feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life.

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter.

Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both.

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

It seemed, at that point, my greed and cunningness were being rewarded.

Well, first of all, no professor should be able to say, I refuse to defend my position. I refuse to debate my position.

However well you know the French language you've learnt it the wrong way, not as a native speaker would. That's my problem as well.

A warp," Nita whispered. "A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?" It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory. (Do I look like a hole?)

[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.

The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is to seek after our dead.

I listen to everything. My I-Pod's really diverse-from guitar instrumentals to Rascal Flatts to Usher.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear this morning brings The outrage of the poor.

I think it's important to have had at least a few years of obscurity, where people treat you like everybody else.

Future is not extrapolation of past