It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

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 don’t know what I’m doing, or where I’m going, but I do know that I want to do whatever it is and get there soon.

There is a third choice besides being busy and killing time, something profound.

As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form.

Don't ever think that somebody isn't important or not good enough, because you never know which way the road will take you.

Many of us don’t realize that we have a choice about which aspect of ourselves we will use as the foundation upon which we build our lives.

Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself.

When we have a great goal we are superior even to justice, not merely to our deeds and our judges.

So the characters that I choose, I like to make sure that they have depth and that they have some sort of bite. It's more fun.

Walk out of any doorway feel your way, feel your way like the day before Maybe you'll find direction around some corner where it's been waiting to meet you.

I think that people who get to a certain position, and then try to ferociously defend it or build on it, it's kind of a dead-end street. You see people becoming miserable that way.