“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance – and I come by this naturally, or I think I do – I am a very good judge of character.

But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I don’t want to just discuss the issues – I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don’t like to write things that feel like issue books.

I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.

You are thirst and thirst is all I know

I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

Absent parents aren’t abusive per se. They’re neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they’re not parents in the way that we might think of it.

Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.

I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.

If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

It’s a complex thing when you’re writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious.

We’re a creation of words, constantly looking for acceptance in places we don’t belong.

I seek calmness in between your words, amidst the chaos that consumes mine

Tomorrow, it seems like an empty word of dreams remembered on waking.

How your words and pauses have become mine. How you are a full stop to my every line. You have colored me with your thoughts, red and white. The tinge of my blood and the pure divine.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

Words do not have meaning without thoughts.

The word “your worth it” didn’t mean much to me growing up. I didn’t get to hear it much.