I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

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 expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.

Moriré besando a Simon Snow. Simon Snow morirá besándome.

I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken, ' I said.

I have and I will always work to promote a civil public discourse.

I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.

When you're making any movie, you have your hopes and expectations - but reality doesn't always conform with your hopes and expectations.

Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.

Non-co-operation is the nation's notice that it is no longer satisfied to be in tutelage.

The so-called mysteries of quantum mechanics are in its philosophical interpretation, not in its mathematics.