I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.