Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.

I don't like myself you know. I love myself. I'm devoted to myself till my dying day. But I don't like myself.

There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Locked together in hatred. But I can't hate you Louis. Louis my love, I was mortal till you gave me your immortal kiss. You became my mother, and my father, and so I'm yours forever. But now it's time to end it, Louis. Now it's time to leave him.