It's a terrible thing, what we did, ” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.

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.

If Entrepreneurship was easy, the term would have been easier to pronounce too!

It’s great to celebrate the victories along the way in living your dreams but never allow the praises of your past pause you from pursuing higher heights.

I went walking around the city some more, people watching with a cold, blank stare. And I saw your face in everyone, I swear.

Probably all the books I've ever written have been efforts to define the boundaries of humanity.

When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.

Work is my norm. I have mad energy, insane energy, a kind of stamina in terms of work that's a little crazy.

Therefore, to estimate the enemy situation and to calculate distances and the degree of difficulty of the terrain so as to control victory are virtues of the superior general.

[It is] a historic step toward eliminating the shameful practice of racial discrimination in the selection of juries.

I went with Beach Fossils and we played 40 shows because we wanted people to see us.