Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.