While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.

I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.

There is no real victory unless it shares the righteousness of that man’s heart.

First drafts don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be written.

The planetary etheric body is a whole, unbroken and continuous; of this etheric body, those of the healer and the patient are integral, intrinsic parts.

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.

I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.

Ann Sothern's dressing room...was unbelievably lush and beautiful. More elegant than many homes I've been in.

Name 12 players better than me.

I try to master every facet of a character in order to build a safety net for myself, so I can go on to take more risks to create someone really distinct.

I think what is great is that if anything that I do is interesting to somebody else, then I really don't think it matters at all what I had originally intended.

I do not know exactly why, but it seems to me that images do not belong to anybody but are instead there, at the disposal of all.