“I love to sleep. Do you? Isn't it great? It really is the best of both worlds. You get to be alive and unconscious.”

“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

“Do you really have to be the ice-queen intellectual or the slut whore? Isn't there some way to be both?”

“To tell a great story, you really do have to step through the box that the world has put around you; you have to see it. You have to see what the world has defined you as. And you have to refute it in language that the world will understand. ... Repay the debt that kept you alive, you will make an art and you will take a leap. And, oh God, I hope you get all the way over to the other side. Because some of us don’t.”

“It's great to be alive, isn't it? Especially when you consider the alternative.”

“If you love someone, you're not supposed to want them to come back. Better a peaceful sleep in the earth than the life of a zombie--not really dead but not really alive, either.”