I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.

There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.

My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.

Something was wrong with a world where people came and went so easily.

...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.