Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.

Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.

Books showed me that there were other ways to live a life.

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.

I know it's hard being a single mother baby, he said, but we're talking fundamentals here. Homemade cookies are one of the best parts of christmas. It's an absolute fundamental.

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well.