Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

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

If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move.

Because that's what heaven is...it's opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.