Always live your life with your biography in mind.

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

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

It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.

Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?

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.

God, the boring relative everyone ignores--no one calls, no one writes--until they need a serious favor.