Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.

Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.

People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better.

But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.