The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

A part of adolescence is feelimg that there's no one else around who's enough like youself to understand you.

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.