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

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

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.

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

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

Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.

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."