My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.

I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them

It's easy to slide into believing you're the hypnotist here, the mirage master, the smart cookie who knows what's real and how all the tricks are done. The fact is you're still just another slack-jawed mark in the audience. No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game. It's more cunning than you are, it's faster and it's a whole lot more ruthless. All you can do is try to keep up, know your weak spots and never stop expecting the sucker punch.

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.