I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.

If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.

I think that most of us are aware that as writers we are seeking absences, we're seeking silences, we're seeking spaces that people haven't entered. No writer is saying, "Hey, I want to go to this very well trod territory and say exactly what someone else has done." I think the nature of a writer, because we are attempting to bring to light areas that people haven't seen before, tends in some ways to be progressive, at least in that light.