Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time

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.

On a planet where for thousands of years, even today, a woman's worth has been judged exclusively by the productivity of her womb, what the hell is the point of a barren woman?

What first separates a leader from a normal human being? A leader knows who they are as a human being.

In speaking of natural rights, therefore, it is essential to remember that these alleged rights have no political force whatsoever, unless recognized and enforced by the state.

He who has a task to perform must know how to take sides, or he is quite unworthy of it.

All art is infested by other art.

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen...We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century.

To talk to someone who does not listen is enough to tense the devil.

I've had many challenges - every entrepreneur does - it's the nature of the beast.

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha have written the essential corrective to the evolutionary psychology literature.

You learn more from your mistakes than you do from your successes.