No writer, painter, or actor - no artist - is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is 'genius'), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.

Legends grow beards, and twenty-three years is plenty of time to grow a long one.

No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver....The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.

It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

You could not turn off love- even the rather absent, sometimes taken for granted love- the way you'd turn off a faucet. Love ran from the heart and the heart had it's own imperatives

I'm most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.