One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Their screams would echo through the house and reverberate against my eardrums until my mind would fracture. Years went by and with each fracture

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

I love you Bonnie. So much that I hurt with it. And I hate it, and I love it, and I want it to go away, and i want it to stay forever....

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.

I had a checkered early career, for sure, with a lot of very unhappy experiences where pictures got taken away, re-cut, re-titled... all the nightmares one hears about.

You can gauge a country's wealth, its real wealth, by its tree cover.

A great idea is not enough.

The mightier any is in the word, the more mighty he will be in prayer.