Don't hoard the past. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

Women writers specifically... are the ultimate outsiders.

Your protagonist is your reader's portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you're creating. They don't have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.

That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone.

She usually loved this band, but today their cheerfulness made her want to crash the car.

I wanted to put words between us, like spikes, to keep myself from falling into him like a girl without bones.