As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

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.

He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

I wonder maybe if our Lord does not suffer more from our indifference, than He did from the crucifixion.

I want to work beyond external aggressions, forget that one has something to do for others if it's not for oneself.

Inspiration Unlimited is more than an e-Magazine. I would rather call it an alchemy of learning and inspiration. It really inspires many people in many ways.

I don't think tennis is a glamour game, not at all.

A man's head is not like a scallion, which will grow again if you cut it off; if you cut it off wrongly, then even if you want to correct your error, there is no way of doing it.

The proper Science and Subject for Man's Contemplation is Man himself. [Fr., La vraie science et le vrai etude de l'homme c'est l'homme.]

I just love life. I'm excited about things in life. I think that if you're excited about life, you are excited about waking up and doing things with your life every day.