As a reader I gravitate toward work that rests in the gray area, that doesn't come with easy answers.

I'd say that most of life seems to me to be that way, a mixture of the mundane and the mythic, when you're living the life of the mind.

I don't see the direct correlation between my personal life and the novel I'm writing until I'm at the end of the novel or very close to it.

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you know you have to hit the ground running.

As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world.

I feel that if I establish the world or the premise from the first line, then I can get the reader to come with me where I want her to go.

When a certain show or film or celebrity captures the imagination of the masses that has a good deal to say about us, I think, and what is happening in our collective psyche.

I could have a lot of fun with Michael Jackson, I'm sure.

As I get older, I'm finding that I recognize certain celebrities only because they frequently grace the pages of US Weekly, but beyond that, I have no idea what they do.

I'm a pop culture junkie. I'm a People magazine reader, an US Weekly subscriber; all of those celebrity magazines get my dollar.

I've realized that with each novel I seem to set out a kind of puzzle for myself. And I am never sure in the process of writing a first draft how it's all going to turn out.

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended

It's weird watching President Bush struggle with excuses for why we went to war. As he struggles, it reminds us all what a terrific liar Bill Clinton really was.

Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.

My childhood memories seem to be wreathed in the twin and far from harmonious olfactory sensations of patchouli oil and caustic soda.

Heroes come and go, but legends are forever.

I grew up very conservatively and traditionally. I wanted to save myself for marriage.

I closed my eyes, thinking, Let me love you, Hardy, just let me.

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

One of Love's qualities--namely, Forgiveness.

Plato rarely if ever states anything about himself clearly.