No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book