“I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I’m always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses.”

There are two kinds of people in this world.

The sterling moment of the present and the glorious future known only in our imaginations.

All you needed is what every girl needs, a good friend.

How dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what’s funny, how to build distinctive and original characters.

If you look around to find meaning in everything that happens you will end up disappointed.

A practical girl never pines; she takes action.

No one worries about you like your mother, and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe.

Book clubs are the best thing that has happened to the world of publishing.

I ask myself, If I knew all the answers, would it help? I lie awake and wonder why I don’t have parents and wonder what will become of my brother and me.

But a child’s joy is doubled for the mother, and the sound of her son’s laughter began to her heart.

No one knows you like the people you live with, and no one will take up your cause to the outside world quite like your blood relatives.

Someone to talk to, to share with, to run things by.

How childish to think that could be easy.

If only men came made to order. It’s so hard to find a decent fellow.

Everything has to be clean and orderly when I sit down to write.

I don’t settle in any other area of my life when it comes to excellence, so why should I lower my standards when it comes to boys?

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

A wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night.

Then they begin to see through their language that the problems described there are the same as the problems they are having. They can identify with characters from another language group.

This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.

When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously.