“I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.”

“Writing isn’t my life…it’s a lovely part of my life... but it’s not my life. My life is family, friends, fishing, food…things like reading and painting and all the rest of it, and you can’t really prioritize when you’re involved with family or you’re involved in fishing, you can’t say, ‘Oh, I really should be writing.”

“A family can be the bane of one's existence. A family can also be most of the meaning of one's existence. I don't know whether my family is bane or meaning, but they have surely gone away and left a large hole in my heart.”

“She had debated, in the frivolity of the beginning, whether to build a hole or a tower; a hole, because she was fond of hobbits, or a tower — well, a tower for many reasons, but chiefly because she liked spiral staircases.”

“The smarter you are, the more you know, the less reason you have to trust or love or confide.”

“The childhood years are the best years of your life… Whoever coined that was an unmitigated fuckwit, a bullshit artist supreme. Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course.”

“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...”