Only in art were there cliches; never in nature. There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with surprise inside.

That’s the hard work of writing. The imagining.

So here is where I am so far, and this is all I know: the world is a big sardine can, and some of us are too agreeable for words. Most of us, really.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

Dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When you're writing lines you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.'

Honestly, my sales pitch when I was a kid was, 'You don't want these Girl Scout cookies, do you?' If I had to push my own books, I'd stop writing. I hate the conflation of marketing and writing.

Well, she had her own sorry self, her own story, the snowflake of her life, but even as a child she had been unimpressed by the breathless adult observation that no two of these were exactly alike. In the first place, she had thought, how does anybody know that? And in the second place, so what?

The future, vague and sad, did not frighten me half as much as knowing that it was not carved in stone.

Ultimately, nobody is predictable, least of all to himself…there wouldn’t be any point in writing fiction otherwise.

Nada era verdaderamente insoportable si se tenía algo que leer.