She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.

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

I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if I can get them and grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, you can do this, and if I see that fire in their eyes, that's when I think I know a writer.

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.

She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along --trying to wound his faith in order to test it--and I was just another stone in the way of his God.