The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

My mother raised me to be a writer.