You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

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.

Know that true change is demonstrated only by your actions around everyone, not just certain people.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

...pain that would have made even a god shiver in terror.

There is a wonderful power that comes when you know that someone will achieve something great due to your help.

Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good behave yourself and never mind the rest.

Being daily better informed about their knowledge than my adversaries themselves, I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.

She took off her wheel, took off her bell, took off her wig, said, how do I smell? I hot footed it barenaked out the window.

Scientists are a bunch of romantics.

men are not realists - only women are.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.