Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.

Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.

If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.

Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.