What are the odds that two separate writers, strangers, a thousand miles apart, would each invent fictions in which guys take girls to an esoteric frog lecture on their first date? If that isn't synchronicity, it's something equally as weird.

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.

Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better.

Never be afraid to love, not even when there's a chance you're not being loved in return.

Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

The Japanese have become so smitten with the Western condiment - its texture as silky as a kimono, its tang as understated as the tang of Zen - that today they have a word for mayonnaise junkie: mayora.