Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

The time is just right to take risks and tell stories the way we want to tell them.

It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.

The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole Can never be a mouse of any soul.

Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.

I paint the fog - I think of its fresh moistness - its stillness - its mystery.

Anything with a good story and characters I think would be great.

I don't like the dark. I really am afraid of the dark.

There is one group of people - social conservatives, religious conservatives - who honestly feel that women's place is in the home and that wives should submit to their husbands.

Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me.