Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.

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.

In this universe, all we perceive is a virtual reality created by the neurons.

Write down 10 things you would do in your life if you had absolutely no fear. Then pick one of them and do it.

Meanwhile 1st April to lie as if they were honest throughout the year.

The emptiness, the way his heels rang on the asphalt, was satisfying, emphasised his aloneness. A man alone, alone late at night with no one to say he should be home in bed.

We are here and it is now. Further than that all knowledge is moonshine.

I had no interest in fashion when I was younger. I was such a tomboy.

U.S. has certainly been wanting this to happen since both Japan and Korea are longtime allies of the U.S. and this estranged relationship has prevented better cooperation.

Sometimes the most important things that we do are things we cannot measure.

To the degree we try to create peace around us, we will find peace within ourselves. And to the degree we find peace within ourselves, we will actually have the power to create peace around us.

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.