We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

My goal in life is to become an adjective.

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.

Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

The only way we know it's true is that we both dreamed it. That's what reality is. It's a dream everyone has together.