I've been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I'm an optimist.

Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew in huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren't worth as much. It was the emerald that didn't break that was the really valuable thing.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away.