Today was a very cold and bitter day, as cold and bitter as a cup of hot chocolate, if the cup of hot chocolate had vinegar added to it and were placed in a refrigerator for several hours.

A good thing to do when one is sitting, eating, and resting is to have a conversation.

This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed over this. This unites us, this part of love.

For Beatrice, I cherished, you perished, The world's been nightmarished.

We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.

My work is very dear to me, and certainly I have had all the emotional highs and lows that go with trying to get it to an audience. But I do have some kind of detachment that seems somewhat unusual in my trade. I'm a writer who writes every day. I don't have a period of months where I can't get anything done and I wander around tearing my hair out. When I come back from a book tour, for instance, I might have one day where I sleep late and then check my e-mail, and then go for a walk, and then the next day I'm really itching to get back at writing a story.

I found powerful the idea that everything we have is, in effect, stolen from everybody else.