Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

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.

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.

I try to be grateful for the abundance of the blessings that I have, for the journey that I'm on and to relish each day as a gift.

The problems we face now - poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad - will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them in the first place.

We live in an age of mediocrity.

Remember that work is not a place for self-fulfillment. If it were, you would know it.

If you love something let it go free. If it doesn't come back, you never had it. If it comes back, love it forever.

People know that pursuing a mission without achieving results is dispiriting; achieving results without a mission is meaningless.

Listen at me. The end is almost never far off any time at all!

We understand the concept of equality, that we all want to be equal. But I think this is absolutely not true. I don't think anybody really wants to be equal. Everybody wants to be more equal.

But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.

The kind of happiness that stays with you is the happiness that springs from inward thoughts and emotions.