He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace.

In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.

Language buries, but does not resurrect.

That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.

Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway

All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.