People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn’t want to see.

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.

Each moment is just that... a moment. Whether good or bad it will pass to the next. Forward to the next and create a wonderful life.

Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.

Why books...audiobooks... stories are created?...Films and Games!?- The answer, is very simple it 's in the name of patience.

About the time you might start to think that science fiction - the real stuff, not the species of fantasy that goes under the name - is really dead, along comes a story by Cory Doctorow.

Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.

Any time you have an individual who is very confident in their abilities to persuade, there can be a rude awakening under cross-examination.

You are the one that possesses the keys to your being. You carry the passport to your own happiness.

A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.