You aim for what you want and if you don't get it, you don't get it, but if you don't aim, you don't get anything.

But beneath it all will run that Sicilian understanding that the underside of joy is grief, that the face of sacrifice and suffering is the dark mirror image of pleasure and enjoyment, that every moment of arrival is to be treasured and enjoyed in the full knowledge that it has brought us a moment closer to the moment of departure.

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my Ph.D. program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

A lot of girls who turn into something remarkable start off as irrepressible, confident and a handful.

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.

People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.