It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that.

I think that we're all always just working on finding how that balance functions for us, given today's circumstances.

A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury....

I used to think I knew all the answers. Then I thought I knew maybe a few of the answers. Now I'm not even sure I understand the questions. Nobody knows anything.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.

He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn't just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we're meant to be.

Every issue of life is determined not by external conditions and things, but by one's consciousness.

The present age ... prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence ... for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

My faith is brightest in the midst of impenetrable darkness.

As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.

Rainbow drops - suck them and you can spit in six different colours.