I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

I can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

I am your own self and the self of all beings that exist.

At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

I don't much like 'Wonderwall,' but the effect that song has on people, I can't deny it.

I love Jennifer Hudson! She is so lovely on screen. She is so buoyant and youthful off screen as much as on.

Whatever God has brought about Is to be borne with courage.

To take no account of oneself, but always to think well and highly of others is the highest wisdom and perfection.

The US government is like an ocean liner, not like a speed boat. It's harder to turn around than people might think.