“I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.”

“Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.”

“My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.”

“To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.”

“You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing t...”

“...if you want your own distinctive voice, you first have to become someone...”

“I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedn...”

“I met Ashley two weeks before I married him. It was a joke-the most ridiculous thing I've ever done. Once I was married, I didn't want to be a failure, so I stuck it out for six months, which was a...”

“There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.”

“Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.”

“Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it.”

“But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace.”