Quotes from Alice Sebold

I think understanding is the way to gain perspective - and therefore can live among those hideous realities. You can live with them.

I wanted to be a novelist for so long.

I'm gradually working through my obsessions, and maybe, when they're all free and clear, I'll write a comedy. But I'm not there yet.

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.

I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.

Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have an hour count; sometimes I'm just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

To transform experience and thought into language and narrative - that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.

Hey, Ocean Eyes," my father said. "Where'd you go on us?