"Laughter comes from living." I shrug, try to sound indifferent. "I've never really been alive before."

Friendship isn't always sunnyside up.

We couldn't believe our luck, and for a little while it felt like we were on some big train rolling down a hill, and all we cared about was how great it felt to be going fast.

I just prefer my fiction with more teeth.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

"Fiction is very, very important," he said, his voice rising. "Storytelling is how people learn. You get people to understand new cultures and other lives through stories. Made-up stories. Fiction."

I am serving the purpose for which I was designed, therefore I am satisfied with my existence.

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

Then the sun came up and shook the night chill out of the air the way you'd shake a rug.

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is...

Human life is fiction's only theme.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it...

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good...

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

Few humans see fairies or hear their music, but many find fairy rings of dark grass, scattered with toadstools, left by their dancing feet.

I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn't anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops… Every goddamned...

Freaky kids like us can't ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of evolutionary development, my shrink says- Normal is just average, not cool. My latest diagnosis is...

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the...

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much...

Many writers, good writers who ought to know better, focus so tightly on the structure demanded by a crime story that they lose track of the fact that they are writing a novel. Accusations of both...

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be...

I'm not smarter than you, I'm more knowledgeable than you, and that's only because I'm older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than...

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.

Books do pretend ...but squeezed in between is even more that is true-without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?

Fiction is like wrestling with angels-you do not expect to win, but you do expect to come away from the experience changed.

Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.

I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person's hand holding mine. There have been times where I felt that I might die of loneliness.

I want to keep you, till the end of days.

I'd always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.