She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

Alone, she took hot baths and sat exhausted in the steaming water, wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the limp, languid weight of her arms, her veins bulging slightly with the pressure of her extreme weariness ... one day in January she drew a razor blade lightly across the inside of her arm, near the elbow, to see what would happen.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.