"When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age."

"What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself."

"An author's dream does not necessarily come instantly. Rather, it is cultivated and nurtured, every epiphany and idea are like rain drops that bring life to the story being written."

"Something has spoken to me in the night...And told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: '[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth."

"As a teen, I heard the second Velvet Underground album, 'White Light/White Heat,' and it was too much for my limited scope of appreciation. It was intense, but I didn't get it."

"I used to sleep on the floor next to the bed, because I believed that I didn't even deserve a bed to sleep in. And then, one morning, a cockroach crawled onto my leg. I looked at it, and suddenly I awoke from a kind of hypnotic trance in which I had been all my life."

"Before the next minute had passed, they had all fallen to the ground. Just like that. As though someone had reached inside and turned off a switch.'What happened?' Matt asked, gasping.I went from one person to the next, trying to wake them up, but they were all dead, wrote Daft Donald."

"She didn't tear him a whole new one for having fucked up the scene by walking all over it so much as she pointed out where, exactly, the new one would be torn if he messed it up again."