If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

Most dreams are also part reality (otherwise we wouldn’t believe them), and reality happens to be a condition that gives you plenty of chances through your life to rise to - no, soar through - the occasion.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

When you're looking around for metaphor or simile, I do think it's often helpful to keep inside the world of the book, to gather your comparisons from the stuff particular to that world - be they king salmon and aviation fuel, or pot roasts and spatulas.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

I turned what was a wonderful case of self-reliance into a case of self-exile. Which is not uncommon, I think, in people who grow really early and have to learn how to take care of themselves. They have trouble hinging their lives with anybody else.