The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.

[…] but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?