“If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.”

“Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”

“To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.”

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

“Suppose you meet me in the woods.”

“Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?”