“The fever, I realized, had gone. Beneath my feet, the hardwood floor felt cool on my feet, the air gentle against my itching legs. This was just the world, after all. Big, thoroughly mapped place t...”

“More than anything, Natalie wanted to move to the bed, take Sophie's hand, sit beside her.Lay her head against her shoulder. But she didn't dare. Or maybe just couldn't. Fear. Friendship. Desire. R...”

“The ghosts that exert the most power in peoples lives-at least, the people I knowtend to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody.”

“Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recogniz...”

“...Ive never understood the logic that says a work doesnt need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, Ive also never understood the lo...”

“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.”

“But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or no...”

“So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.”

“Writing is a struggle against silence.”

“Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”

“People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links t...”