Without animals, there would be no humanity. In a world of just people, people will mean nothing . . .

No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.

She's so thin she's either dying or rich.

There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.

To a certain extent everybody has a certain sort of way of being a persona that they learn how to be when they're really little. They figure out that if they're really funny, or really pretty, or if they work really, really hard or are really smart, then that's what's going to get them by. That is what is going to make people like them.

My books do have a sort of romantic community at the end - people coming together. But on a more basic level, I always see them as being about power, in the same way that Harry Potter books are pitched to a population of young people who really have no power.

I know so many writers who are a hundred times better than me and have longer, greater ideas than mine, but they gave up; they stopped. The biggest talent you can have is determination.