Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

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.

As a lifetime people pleaser, I remember trying to mold myself into the person I thought other people wanted me to be—all for the sake of being liked and accepted. It caused more pain than gain.

Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as are others of what they know.

I think long and hard about what it is I'm actually trying to do, and then I kind of have to narrow my focus into that. If I don't, I'm too all over the place.

Maybe you don't need to do this. Maybe this isn't your moment. But if you do feel the pull of the eternal, then you can't stay away from it.

In every place, where there is any thing worthy of observation, there should be a short printed directory for strangers.

Hongry rooster don't cackle w'en he fine a wum.

I can't put into words what I think about anything.

Human beings are part of nature. Anything they do is natural. It's impossible for anything in nature to do anything unnatural.

Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?