I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

A man can overcome his background, even as he can overcome a skilled opponent.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

Realism has always been called cynicism.

Find something to believe in, and find it for yourself. And when you do - pass it on to the future.

Filmmaking is like playing in your imagination and getting paid to do it. I guess I'll ride this horse until it bucks me.

In the first person, the readers feel smart, like it's them solving the case.

To me, torture would be watching sports on television.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear