“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]”

“If I’d had any doubts about how Archer felt about me, they were eradicated when I saw the look on his face. I’d never had my spleen ripped out, but if I had, I figured I’d make the same face Archer wore now.”

“I had discovered something; there was a pleasure in becoming something new. You could will yourself into a fresh shape. Now all I had to do was figure out how to do it out there, in my life.”

“For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget.”

“(About her first job as a fashion model in New York...) It was mostly hats. I was too short and my breasts were too big, so any fantasies I had about modeling in New York literally went to my head. I wore hats.”

“It's weird. I never knew how much I had to hate about myself until I had the time to think about it.”