Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

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.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

Write what you know.

Effie Seabright, we’ve been fated to meet you for a long time.

I really believe that you have to earn things. I don't feel comfortable unless I have worked really hard.

To think that God is compassionate is a terrible mistake. To think that God is wrathful is equally stupid. God isn't emotional. You are. To superimpose your emotions on infinity is typically human.

I'm a journalist and that's what I do.

His eyes burned violet - not with anger but with intense desire. The kind of look that made you love a person so much, you missed him even when he was standing right in front of you.

How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another's grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.

The moment the cultivators of the soil realize their power, the evil of Zamindari will be sterilized.

I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.