I didnt write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.

By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.

The worst things weren't outside of you.

I do have trouble starting books. I have ideas that I have trouble starting to write. But I'm the kind of person who tends to finish everything she starts out of sheer stubbornness.

She couldn’t get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn’t get away.

You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?

If I'm writing by intuition, generally that calculation works itself out. But if I'm writing a mystery, and somebody has to have a reason for doing what he's doing, and it's not anything I can imagine myself wanting to do, things get a little more difficult to write, and careless mistakes are made.