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.

If you sort of see yourself writing into a space that you don't always recognize, you sometimes learn things that you knew, but weren't entirely aware of. It's very liberating for a writer to go into a space where she or he has not gone before, because, instead of being a tourist, you're like an explorer now, and you're sort of lost in this new idea.

I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.

One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.