I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate.

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that the adversary has set out.

In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their asses off all year long and get two weeks off! It's incredible.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two.

The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West.

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world.

The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.

Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant and that everyone just wants to be like America.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything

You can be as good as Rembrandt, but if no one discovers you, you will only be a genius in theory.

I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.

If you don't have a positive attitude in business and in life, you will never, ever be successful.

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.

The blind eate many a flie. [The blind eat many a fly.]

From love arises hatred of those things which are contrary to what we love, or which oppose and thwart us in those things that we delight in.

I adore themes of hope and courage and the ways we find meaning through suffering.

I've heard some readers saying they wished the story was longer, and I completely understand that desire - we all like to sink into a nice, long novel.

When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.