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

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

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.

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

Go where your best prayers take you.

Have you started already? Keep it up! Are you getting tired? Don't give up! Did you quit? You can do it again! Great accomplishments do not come with big steps

A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.

I didn't always spell my name Bil. My parents named me Bill, but when I started drawing cartoons on the wall, they knocked the 'L' out of me.

And New Year's Eve is very, very important to me.

You can spend your life watching other people win or beat your name into history.

To get out of a hard situation, try a soft answer.

I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.

I will take my coffee black / never snack / hang with the wolves who are sheepish.

Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren't they? They're always telling us what's going to happen, and we know they don't know!