It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.

I’ve always said to people, "I don’t care what you call me as long as the checks don’t bounce and the family gets fed." But I never saw myself that way. I just saw myself as a novelist.

There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase the other, if you please.

Rage-the biggest, truest rage of her adult life-had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn't like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear.