Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

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.

If God has given us life, He is capable of any other thing.

The only thing I hate about good people is that they like making their being good people bad people’s problem.

Freedom breeds uncertainty

I wear myself out trying to render the orange trees so that they're not stiff but like those I saw by Botticelli in Florence. It's a dream that won't come true.

Even if you want something so badly, without talent, you can't even get the opportunity. You remain as the chorus for the rest of your life.

You're going to die. That's going to happen. What matters is what you do with your time before you get flushed out.

Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.

Love is given to us as a time, but to keep it always, we must make it a place.

I'm the kind of guy who really likes a challenge. It's more rewarding.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.