Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so...

The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

I don’t believe in writer’s block.

Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop

There’s a difference between being alive and living.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

The easiest way to get old is to be technologically behind…

No one will ever love me that much again.

I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it’s the best available option at the time.

Despite the fact that he loves books and owns a bookstore, A.J. does not particularly care for writers. He finds them to be unkempt, narcissistic, silly, and generally unpleasant people. He tries to avoid the...

I wish that the adults who are ‘in power’ cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young – the books I read as a child have stayed with...

It’s a tragic fact to die in an accident

It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.

My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn’t show too much.

I’m in the middle of a 25-city book tour, and I like watching what people buy in bookstores. I see people buy books that I strongly suspect they will never read, and as an author,...

Since i couldn’t remember the “real” first time i’d lost my virginity, this would have become my de facto first time. I wanted a better story then: I did it with this boy who i...

There’s the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there’s the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing in opposing but perfect symmetry. The branches don’t think...

A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at...

I know he’s a good person. And he said he was sorry. And I love him. And when you love a person, you have to forgive him sometimes.

I’m like a unicorn; I’m a midlist writer who hasn’t done anything else but write. But because I wasn’t amazingly famous, I didn’t become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan...

Death is a state of mind—many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

If this were a novel, I’d stop reading right now. I’d throw it across the room.

But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, ’cause I’m liable to sink us both. (222)

I’m very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it’s great to be aware of how publishing works.

There’s a pleasure to loving someone even when you know there’s no chance in them loving you back. The pain I felt let me know I was still alive.

Do you like Moby Dick?” he asks.”I hate it,” she says. “And I don’t say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of ‘quality.’ But...

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads....

When I first started writing, I used to listen to music all the time because it would make time pass more quickly. And then I started to wonder if the music wasn’t affecting my writing...

All of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we...

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

Daddy used to say that calling a person a romantic was just another way of saying he or she acted without regard for conseqences.

Sometimes, readers, when they’re young, are given, say, a book like ‘Moby Dick’ to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it’s not something that somebody who has never read a book before...

The words you can’t find, you borrow.We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.My life is in these books,...

What were you like,” I asked her. “we’re you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.

In truth, she hadn’t put much thought into whether she was happy before. She supposes that since she never thought about it, she must have been happy. People who are happy don’t really need to...

Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank...

When I was in my twenties and broke, I’d buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.

I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.

Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.

They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

People choose to read, and it takes effort. It’s not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It’s more than a hobby.

There are many challenges to long distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put on’s house keys.

Wounds are like water set to boil – they heal best left unwatched…

For the record, I have long suspected that my favorite book is actually ‘Charlotte’s Web.’

I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction...