The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.

...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

...larger than life...I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.