The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

He traveled in order to come home.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

I had hoped when my life was chronicled, it would be an inspirational story.

Boys, they can't take my refrigerator now. They'll never get my car now. I paid cash for 'em and they're mine, and I'm keepin' 'em!

Night begins to muffle up the day.

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.

In writing advertising it must always be kept in mind that the customer often knows more about the goods than the advertising writers because they have had experience in buying them.

If your heart, head and gut are telling you the same thing, then you owe it to yourself to chase it.

If the standard route for creating a family had worked for me, I wouldn't have met this child. I needed to know her. I needed to be her mother. She is, in every way my daughter.

Of all the phantoms fleeting in the mist Of time, though meagre all and ghostly thin; Most unsubstantial, unessential shade Was earthly fame.

Your friends, family, and kids have to understand that's your priority. It's the only way you can be successful.