Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

This very moment calls for you to rise to the test and show your challenges what you are truly made of.

Every collaboration with a new person is like when you take a bin of Legos and dump them on the floor. All of the pieces to work with are right there. A floor full of Legos is full of possibilities.

True progress comes not through action, but through awakening.

Art criticism everywhere is now at a low ebb, intellectually corrupt, swamped in meaningless jargon, distorted by political correctitudes, anxiously addressed only to other critics and their ilk.

France will insist on the need for updated and responsive institutions.

Sam: “I—it’s—I’m not an animal.

The spiritual discipline of simplicity is not a lost dream, but a recurrent version throughout history. It can be recaptured today. It must be.

The Buddha always emphased the important of good friends.

Before I was paralyzed, there were 10,000 things I could do; now there are 9,000. I can either dwell on the 1,000 I've lost or focus on the 9,000 I have left.