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

One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

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.