I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

All wisdom ends in paradox.

My goal in life is to become an adjective.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it. That's what inspiration is. You don't get it from the gods. You make it.

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

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.