In terms of the secrets that imbue and underlie Fall on Your Knees, they were as much of a mystery to me as I was creating the story as they are to the readers.

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.

Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you're carrying on your shoulders.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.

Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.

They are so young, they forget that the world is not as in love with them as they are.

Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself.

We live in a world where people say that you can believe anything you want about God.

If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.

The Nazis learned their propaganda from the progressive movement in the United States.

People don't live in Los Angeles because we are tied to the same old, same old. We live in Los Angeles because of the intoxicating energy of new beginnings that permeate our city.

As an actor, you can show up on a set and be on a TV show for three or four years, or whatever it is and, by the end of it, you just want to do something else.

Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything.

The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).

I've produced my own films for twenty years now - it means I have to talk to less people.