I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.

If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.