Why are you doing this to yourself? When something bad happens, why do you have to pick at it until it bleeds all over again?
Accidents did not just happen. From time to time they were carefully plotted, calculated, and arranged to one’s advantage-all, of course, under the cloak of happenstance.
I know that the first person I kissed won’t be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.
Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else’s.
I can get 400 pages down the road and still not know the answer. What I do know is that I have really examined every facet of the situation, and I may not have changed my opinion but I have definitely forced myself to explore why it’s my opinion.
Sometimes when you find something you didn’t really realize you were looking for, you just don’t know how to react.
The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn’t have an easy answer, and isn’t always an easy book to write.
I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I’m going to do with it.
Many people have a novel inside them, but most don’t bother to get it out.
You want to write something as good as what you’ve read.
I don’t believe in writer’s block. Most of writer’s block is having too much time on your hands. My mantra is that you can always edit a bad page; you can’t edit a blank page.
Gay rights to me that is the last civil right that we have not granted in America and I think it’s an enormous embarrassment.
Any time you put on the mouthpiece of somebody that you’re not, there’s a professional responsibility to get it right. I did a great deal of research in both of those arenas.
For me, every book is a journey – questioning a really difficult topic that most people don’t want to talk about, much less write about. And that’s what I need; that works for me as a writer.
The ideas choose me, not the other way around.
It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you’d be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you’re going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn’t be there. Either that, or you’d confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.
Heroes didn’t leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn’t wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.
How could he convey to someone who’d never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?
All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn’t yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she’d been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn’t have anything she wanted. You didn’t get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn’t control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.
Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn’t mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you’re standing on the other side.