Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it’s also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone.

I don’t steer clear of genres. I simply haven’t steered myself toward some of them.

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A’s from the time I was in kindergarten.

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

It’s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was...

Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing down enough to remember what made your life worthwhile and happy.

I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.

Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was the man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out trinkets...

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what’s comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with...

My writing often contains souvenirs of the day – a song I heard, a bird I saw – which I then put into the novel.

Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?

What happened to Violet was terrible, and I’m not saying fate happens without blame. But when fate turns out well, everyone should forget the bad road that got us here.

It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

Entonces debes enseñarle esta misma lección a mi hija. Cómo perder la inocencia pero no la esperanza. Cómo reír eternamente.

Quiero que nuestro amor sea tan grande que nos duela por dentro

I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read – which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I’m told my books...

Kehidupan hanyalah ilusi yang harus kau lepaskan. Ketika makin tua, kau menyadari perubahan posisimu sehubungan dengan kematian. Di masa muda topik kematian adalah filosofis, di usia tiga puluhan topik itu tidak bisa diterima, dan di...

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

God, life changes faster than you think.

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.

Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

All objects exist in a moment of time.

When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it’s all part...

Ahora sabes por qué razón es inútil llorar. Tus lágrimas no se llevan tus penas, sino que alimentan la alegría de otros. Por eso has de aprender a tragártelas.

…and it’s ridiculous that anyone would praise a child for standing with arms spread out on a wooden cross, as if she were Jesus’s dead sister wearing a checkerboard tablecloth.

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie’s mom down the...

,Acaso el odio no es un simple resultado del amor herido?

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that’s what I do as a writer.

I do not consider myself a religious person, because I don’t adhere to a particular religion or faith or prescribed beliefs, as did my father, who was a Baptist minister. And I am not an...

Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you’ve just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are a delusion, then let me be deluded.

wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything.I think this to myself even though I love my daughter....

Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had...

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

Dementia was like a truth serum.

…I was like a bird, my wings once carried on a wind of lies. I would beat those wings to stay aloft, and when the wind suddenly died or buffeted me around, I would keep...

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn’t have encouragement, but I didn’t have discouragement, because I don’t think anybody knew what that meant.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.