Time is the most extraordinary gift for friendship. You'll get to eat your meals together and study together; in some cases you'll even sleep in the same room. You'll have time to waste on each other. You'll find out every single thing you have in common and still have time to catalogue all of your differences. Don't underestimate the vital necessity of friendship in your life because it is the thing that will sustain you later, when there will be considerably less time.

The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.

I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.

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.

I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.