When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic.

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.

She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.