I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

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.

You’re beautiful. If you believe it, they’ll believe it.

People came here for a reason, to follow their conscience, to be free!

My understanding is that Kansas, Massachusetts, they've been more pioneers on the special education side.

Personally I don't think day traders are speculating, because traditional speculation requires some market knowledge. They are, instead, gambling, which doesn't.

Women are so gentle, so affectionate, so true in sorrow, so untired and untiring! but the leaf withers not sooner, and tropic light fades not more abruptly.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I'd play 'em over and over.

The perfect date is the one where anything and everything goes wrong, but at the end of it, all you want is to see them again.

You will need to find your passion. Don't give up on finding it because then all you're doing is waiting for the Reaper.

I'll never forgive myself. We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out.