As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.

Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.

I was very much a child of the Cold War.

So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.