I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

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.

A strong woman builds her own world. She is one who is wise enough to know that it will attract the man she will gladly share it with.

She needs to make one phone call, and she wishes she could make it into her past. Into last year. Or two years ago.

Computer Science is a science of abstraction -creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.

You are never so easily fooled as when trying to fool someone else.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.

Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone, Can nature show as fair?

Best thing that's ever happened to me. I focus so much less on me. It's made me content, it's made me happy. It's like a Christmas present every single day that I get to unwrap. It's hard work.

I'm really disappointed at every event if I don't do less than what I wanted to do.

Now let the weeping cease; Let no one mourn again. These things are in the hands of God.