Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.

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.

It's not whether your glass is empty or full, it's what you do with it that really matters.

This is definitely / for the brothers / who ain't here.

Courage is God's way of testing the virtues you profess to have and your level of commitment to everything you think you are.

The ribs are the wings of the body. Open your wings.

Jace hated it when other people were worried on his behalf. It made him feel like maybe there really was something to worry about.

I think my career would probably be in a better place had I been more aggressive. But I don't have it in me. I'm not a competitive person, and I'm also really private.

Disrupt, and you will be saved.

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies.

Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theatre.

Threadbare his songs seem now, to lettered ken: They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.