Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.

Those who do not think bout the future cannot have one.

Friendship depends on interlocking time, place, and state of mind.

Everybody is equally weak on the inside, just that some present their ruins as new castles and become kings –

Any conversation including the mention of Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, or Emily Dickinson is one worth getting into or at least eavesdropping.

I don't see myself as a great discoverer of artists, like Charles Saatchi.

Languages are the keys of science.

marriage was a calamity, but it was not an occupation.

If the Republicans get control back of the United States Senate, we will no longer have a check and balance on the White House, on the Republican Congress.

Treat a thousand dispositions in a thousand ways.