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

It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.

It had never occurred to her that God would cry, but of course that was wrong. God would be crying all the time. He would cry and cry and never stop.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.

The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.