No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?

The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

If my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something about the world. I would like to say that they can trust that what they do learn in the novel will be accurate, because I pay a lot of attention to facts. I do a lot of research to make sure that I'm not giving them, you know, blue moons of Jupiter. It's not science fiction.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.