Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

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.

We need to teach our nation to detest any form of plots, insinuations, evil intrigues and violence.

it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

To love others, first find that sense of connection within yourself. In other words, love yourself first. that's when you will learn to love life.

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect.

The superabundance alludes to the myth that is ensuring our demise but it's also the space around and possibly the void that we enter into, beyond that delusion.

I know I just need to be me.

I don't even think of chimps as animals. I think of them as beings.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.