What was the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing.

I wish I'd known at the beginning that all I really had to do is trust myself. Everything would work out as if by magic once I actually leaned back into my imagination and just let it work, and not question it and not fret about it.

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

Nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.A piece of the universe?A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.