“So from the first novel I’ve been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don’t try to protect them in ways that aren’t good for the story.”

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I’m reviewing a book or doing research.

Well. I don’t suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can’t.

I’ve found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person.

How quickly a person in pain whom you can’t help becomes a reproach. And then, no doubt, a thorn.

If you’re going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won’t be interesting to the reader.

Observe that the body of man is confined to a small place; it covers only two spans of earth. But the spirit and mind of man travel to all countries and regions

The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.

We’re so distant, words can’t save us.

I know we don’t talk anymore, but I still whisper your name to the moon.

But Ash, I can’t continue to want you from a distance. To love you and not have you. I’d end up in jail if anyone tried to touch you and God forbid you tried to date someone.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

If you don’t go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.