If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.
I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.