I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.

Kenneth Branagh. There was a time in my life when people would tell me constantly that I look like him. I could do a lot worse than that.

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

Truth can set you free only when you embrace it. Just knowing without accepting won't work.

Sometimes people aren't hating on you. Because they feel a certain way about themselves, they just don't know how to be happy for you.

To be happy, the only thing you need is to have happy thoughts.

Who else but a lover retains the ability to wound the other person with such passion, such precision? And who else but that lover has the capacity to heal what he or she has done?

As I see it every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.

She's not perfect, but she tries so hard for me. And I thank God, that she isn't, cause how boring that would be.

A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives.

A fish has no concept of water.

If I told you, you'd only know it in your mind, not in your heart. There's a big difference.

The game isn't over till it's over.