“Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.”

“What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?”

“We shared a daughter? I'd not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to hare Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther...”

“Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.”

“It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that ...”

“Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps ones hands free of another mans throat, free of ones own. These machines have all, a...”

“Ritsu... Do you like Oda?" More than me?"Yes.”

“Big skirmishes over small misunderstanding make things bad in a relationship.”

“If you dont want anyone to misunderstand you, go into yourself and thoroughly investigate and understand yourself. No one will ever misunderstand you ever again.”

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes y...”

“I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when Im working on a story, Ill find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where theyve taken the story. Its as if ...”

“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”