Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date--one that you can't see until she tells you she's leaving, and then she's gone.

It was a completely new feeling for me–like someone had just released a million, tiny butterflies loose in my stomach, and they were feverishly flying up into my head and making me lose my mind.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

The past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.

The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.