I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

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.

Change is simply a shift of the “Old Way - Chaos - New Way” to do things.

No if's, but's or maybe's. It's all or nothing. You're either going to soar to new heights or crash and burn. Why live by any other philosophy.

Myth: US housing market is in recovery. Fact: Big banks have been hiding their bloated home inventory, seized by virtue of home foreclosures.

There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.

I would be lying if I didn't say that the most inspirational place for me is Jamaica.

The best time to give feedback to strong people is when they're feeling weak, and to weak people when they're feeling strong.

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

There are no mistakes or accidents. The present is malleable. Influence the odds. Free will is your pen, write your life.

Im married to my job. Im obsessed with my work, and I run myself into the ground every single day. Unfortunately, a lot of other pursuits have to take a back seat.

Ladies love a man with shirt off, so my shirt stays off