To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.

If I was a waitress, I was too tired at the end of the day when I came home to try to write.

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.