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

What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.

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

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

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 couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.