I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

I laughed. “You’re too young to be so … pessimistic,” I said, using the English word. “Pessi-what?” “Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things.” “Pessimistic … pessimistic …” She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. “I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.

I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you'd quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.

It's just like sex; when [a book is] finished, it's finished.

It was spring break, so the theater was always packed with high schools students. It was an animal house. I wanted to burn the place down.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.