Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy

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.

Death is not the end death can never be the end. Death is the road. Life is the traveller. The Soul is the Guide

Unless you break free from the shackles of beauty as dictated by the media and society, true beauty will be elusive.

O Lord, grant me the grace of endurance, in the race of life.

If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that's for sure.

One I'm deeply into is Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals." I was the only person in the US who hadn't read it.

Wildness It is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it again.

I am deeply aware of the dimension of luck. It's so important to be prepared to receive it, but it is a major factor. There's no question.

I think there's a general misconception that anything written quickly lacks quality, and I don't believe that.

Mindfulness can play a big role in transforming our experience with pain & other difficulties; it allows us to recognize the authenticity of the distress & yet not be overwhelmed by it.

Tao is the source of both fullness and emptiness. But it is itself neither fullness nor emptiness.