“(It was also helpful that the hotel’s owner tended to turn a blind eye to room sharing. A room filled with too many guests was better than one with no guests at all.)”

“No one hid their interest when I walked into the room. I'm not sure if it was the news about Boo or my general appearance. At home, people would have asked. People would have been crawling all over me for information. At Wexford, they seemed to extract what they wanted to know by covert staring.”

“She was standing in the airport of Copenhagen, staring at a doorway, trying to figure out if it was (a) a bathroom and (b) what kind of bathroom it was. The door merely said H.Was she an H? Was H "hers"? It could just as easily be "his". Or "Helicopter Room: Not a Bathroom at All”

“She couldn't take her eyes off the boxers. Mostly, she had a view of the back, but he turned halfway when he looked over. She commanded herself not to look at the front flap, which, of course, was exactly what she honed in on.He spit and put his mouth under the tap to get some water. All while just wearing underwear. All while she just stared at the crucial spot of the Action Pants.”

“One question," I said. "Did you tell me all that because you think I'm going to die?""No," he said. "It's because you're doing something brave, and I felt I should too.""I'll take that as a yes," I said.”

“Sometimes artist like to catch themselves looking out, let the world see them for once. It's a signature. This one is a very bold one. But this is also a witnessing. We want to remember, and we want to be remembered. That's why we paint.”

“A lot of teenagers write to me and say "I want to write a book. I want to get published." And those are two very different things. For the first one, that you want to write a book, I think is an excellent idea and you should totally do that because teenagers who want to write, you should be writing. You should be writing all the time like a maniac. Don't worry about the second bit, just yet because A. You need a lot of practice. You need to do it for, I'm not kidding, years. And then once you are published, it's a business. It's a job. Plus, every author I know was that teenager who sat in their room and read and wrote. That's who becomes an author, but that's what you have to do for a while before you become an author.”