I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.

It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.