Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word. It's really crafting this whole piece from nothing.

You can do everything differently in a novel. Hero narrates the novel; we're in his head. You're hearing all his thought processes and you're hearing him call himself out on his bad behavior. You don't have the benefit of that narrator in a movie. What you see a character do, very often, becomes that much more important because you don't have him editorializing it for you.

I want to explain everything to him, show him that it’s really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.

It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.

Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.

You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.

You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.