I was one of those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.

But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the ember in a nursery fire of a winter's evening. I remember them.

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.

When you love something you just don't want to stop talking about it.

In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

We are small but we are many We are many we are small We were here before you rose We will be here when you fall