Obviously it's easier when I' m doing the adapting myself. But my feeling is, your potential upside far outweighs the downside. Ultimately, they [moviemakers] can't change your book. Your book remains on the shelf the way you wrote it. If they make a great movie of your book, then you have the equivalent of millions and millions of dollars of advertising for your book. If the movie's not that good, that doesn't mean the book's not good. It doesn't change what you've already written. It has the potential to reach more people.

At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

What it must feel like, I thought, to look at something, anything really, and know that it’s for the last time?

We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.

Rowdy, hopped-up college kids pass us in an endless, noisy blur like they're being mass produced or squeezed out of a tube - guys skulking in their T-shirts and cargo shorts, girls in low-slung jeans and flip-flops, pimples and breasts and tattoos and lipstick and legs and bra straps, and cigarettes; a colorful, sexy melange. I feel old and tired and I just want to be them again, want to be young and stupid, filled with angst and attitude and unbridled lust. Can I have a do-over, please? I swear to God I'll make a real go of it this time.

You lost your wife, Douglas. My heartbreaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don’t even get to mourn.