It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.

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.

I made my name”. What does this mean? It means that a man has successfully graduated through the process of inner self-development

Conceited people never hear anything but praise.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

Christmas, my child, is love in action.

I'm very politically active, but that has nothing to do with my charity.

It takes people a while to trust you.

Wise teachers create an environment that encourages students to teach themselves

The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing 'I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,' was C.S. Lewis and the 'Narnia' books.

Simplicity is freedom.

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?