It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

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

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.

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.

Look beyond the present circumstances, imagine a brighter future.

You're a miracle, Walker. Your fingers are. Your toes are. Your crushing sadness and guilt are.

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

That's where the songs come from: that's what I'd most want people to understand. What sounds good or looks good, that's nothing. The only worthwhile thing in art is seeing someone else's heart.

The higher you ascend, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. But most of all they hate those who fly.

None of my family had anything to do with show business, my life was totally foreign to them.

Chicago’s neighborhoods have always been the city’s greatest strength.

With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.

It's like thinking you're going to heaven, but when you get there it turns out to be Cleveland.