Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.

I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.

Love has little to do with romance and everything to do with honor.

Father giving advice to son: Never do anything once around the house that you don't want to do for the rest of your life.

I'm a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character.

I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.

...For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.

In the mouths of many men soft words are like roses that soldiers put into the muzzles of their muskets on holidays.

Apple no longer builds any products. When I was there, people used to call Apple "a vertically integrated advertising agency," which was not a compliment.

I've never supported this concept of going after Napster. I think the rock bands who fought this were wrong.

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.

Journalists often put things into either-or scenarios.