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

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.

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

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.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.