When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.