I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself

Every problem has a solution, although it may not be the outcome that was originally hoped for or expected.

I thought of the bowl of water my mother taught me to look into. It was true, everything a person ever needed to know was right there in a single bowl small enough to fit in the palm of one hand.

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

...but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.

This day is going to be awful. It's the sort of day you wouldn't mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.

I can't really work on more than one thing at a time