Beauty alters the grain of reality.

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.

The dead do not hurt you

The greatest writers are the ones not afraid to share their heartbreak and pain for the world to read.They are fearless and freely in sharing their heart to heal other wounds with their story.

Umbrellas raining upon me, as these cloudy tears give me shelter.

People is, I think, it's their nature - some people's nature, in a way, to be angry or jealous or just spiteful about somebody else's blessings.

My name is E. Howard Hunt. I'm currently retired from more than 22 years in the profession of espionage.

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

If someone wants to be a part of your life, they’ll be there. So don’t bother saving a spot for someone who won’t make an effort to stay.

A fool is only troublesome, a pedant insupportable.

People too smart to get involved in politics are doomed to live in societies run by people who aren't.

There are some particular moral truths that I believe we have access to (such as the one not to inflict pain on a sentient being for no reason).