What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

It's such a liability to love another person.

Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.

We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.