Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.

The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.

We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

The ground was silvery, as if some stars had fallen there.

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.