In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

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.

Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.

She shone like the horizon when it is almost too bright to look upon.

Don't beat yourself up, " said Charlotte. "True love can be so easily mistaken for other things-friendship, humane concern, indigestion...

Yes it is, because you can only be brave if you're scared.

I believe that all women are pretty without makeup- but with the right makeup can be pretty powerful.

Volunteerism is vital in all times; it keeps our communities alive...and will make a difference in the lives of those who will come after us.

When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.

The problem with people nowadays is that a 'necessity' is any luxury your neighbor happens to have.

I'm not the sort of bloke who spends a long time in the bathroom. I've never used a face cream in my life and I don't like it when I go on TV and they offer me make-up. I tell 'em, 'No thanks.'

Actually there's a very bad trend in some cults about how Guru's are supposed to be mean to their students, and there are some who revel in this and are abusive.