“Intense desire not only creates its own possibilities, but its own talents. Don't be afraid to do something just because it's impossible.”

“We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.”

“I don't believe in money. It's fickle and it's false and it's created poverty in its own name. I do use it though when I need to. But I don't believe it, although I understand a lot of folks do.”

“It's impossible to find happiness if you're an orphan.""That's not true. Orphans are the only ones who are free to find their own happiness; they don't have their own history so they create it for themselves.""But, Z, that's just an illusion. Their lives are determined for them by people who have no relation to them whatsoever -- total strangers dictate their future. They have no attachment to anything, they stumble around in the dark until one day something happens to set them on a different, random path. I don't call that freedom.""But that's just what it's like for all of us!”

“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete ”

“It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.”