People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say,'

You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.

I didn’t feel anything but a bone-deep weariness. Like I was suddenly a hundred years old, and I knew at that moment I would have to live a hundred more years, carrying my grief around like a backpack full of stones.

They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.

If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?

There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards.

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.