I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing things and not allowing things outside of myself to distract me or bother me or affect me in any way.

Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.

Whatever hardships there have been in my life I still live in a very privileged position. Fear is not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Fear is seeing a child get hurt. Fear is watching someone you love waste away. Fear is knowing you are going to die yourself. But there's no fear in what I do. I write books.

I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.

I sleep during the day. I still dream about drinking and drugs. Sometimes I wake to a hang-over, sometimes I wake to a trickle of blood from my nose, sometimes I wake scared and shaking. I read, go to museums and visit Lilly in the afternoon. Sometimes I read to her, sometimes I talk to her, sometimes I just sit and remember the times, remember the times, remember the times." (James Frey, pg.119)

Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work.

Fear, he said, ran all of our lives. Fear, he said, after religion, was the most destructive force in the world.