There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.

I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere