There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

-Who are you, anyway? -Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.