I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.

Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.

I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.

Everybody believes in chance.

The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.

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.]