A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.

My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.

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.

...The men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you'd stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt.

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.