You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.

We're all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn't know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.