I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it.

If you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away.

The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked...that's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.