Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

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.

If you are looking for a friend that will never change, go to the shelves, you'll find it there. It will never change and will stay the same today and forever.

Grace will meet you in the valley, and her song will carry you home on the wind to another sky filled with ethereal beauty unfolding and love everlasting.

The most benevolent souls are the one's who have had to drink some of life's worst poisons, yet protected others in their lives from ever having to taste them.

Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool.

Do you remember a scene with Ryan and Ali playing in the snow? Well, that was improvised.

A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.

My mom and father are extremely proud. They love it when I don't die. I've done so many movies where I've died that their first question when I book a job is, 'So, are you going to die in this?

[To the suggestion that Great Britain might someday want a Republic:] We'll go quietly.

The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!

I understand thy kisses, and thou mine, And that's a feeling disputation.