If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you.

Half my life is an act of revision.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.