I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

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.

Love nature as if it is your own garden of love.

Custom is second nature.

My brother and I have too good a relationship to spoil it by working together.

And from the whole she deduced this useful lesson, that to go previously engaged to a ball, does not necessarily increase either the dignity or enjoyment of a young lady.

To me, skating should look effortless even when you're doing the hardest of elements.

I want to experiment; I want to keep growing. I didn't want to just sit back and rest on my haunches and do the things I knew I could do for a while.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

When man, governed by reasonable laws, enjoys his natural freedom, let him despise woman, if she do not share it with him.

In that long sequence, when Lawrence enters in the desert to rescue a lost man, Lean listened the music I wrote and wanted to extend the scene to let my work stay completely.