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

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

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.

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.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.

I pressed the dress to my nose, and found what was left of your ghost. It was then that I remembered how to cry.

We commit vanishing acts when things get too close. We flirt like lovers and love like ghosts.

I had a playlist of his name. Of songs he would send me now and then. Now every song I hear is a ghost of him. A reminder that he is here. But he is not.

One time I stayed at a haunted motel. When I checked into my room, there was a sheet on the floor, and I thought it was a ghost that had passed out, so I kicked it.

I know people who believe in ghosts but don’t believe in themselves.

He disappeared like a ghost in the night but I kept looking for him in the shadows of the moonlight.

He treated her like a ghost, not wonder her memory haunted him long after she was gone.