You cannot fake effort; talent is great, but perseverance is necessary.

I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world, made it out of the flax and netting and leftover trim of someone else's life, I know, but made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it.

Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

Great sex is not a pleasant soak in the tub, with the scented candle burning. Great sex is more like a bomb exploding inside your right mind.

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.

Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.