But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work

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.

Political cynicism, disengagement, democratic decadence — call it what you will — is too often an excuse for physical and intellectual laziness.

Nothing is impossible for pure love.

But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

The owner of a Florida massage parlor has been arrested by police. "There weren't any serious violations," said the officers, "she just rubbed us the wrong way."

I'm interested in learning more about myself and what I value in myself and letting that be the beautiful part of me, rather than putting on the makeup or wearing the right designer.

I'm really not a fan of voiceovers; I think they become a crutch.

It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he [the artist] can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

Our press is the most disgusting in the world.

There's a feminist writer, Naomi Wolfe, who is reconsidering her position on abortion.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.