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.

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.

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.

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

First Cosmic Seal:(Devic Seal 333) One who has received this Cosmic Seal is empowered to control not less than 40, 000 spirits.

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

By focusing on positive, healthy motivations and letting the more negative ones pass, you can purify the source of you imaginative power.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

Things couldn't stay the same forever.

If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.

Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets have to be 'discovered' by somebody else.

Washington has always had a pretty healthy amount of self-loathing.

Decisive action has been taken on the home front with passage of the USA Patriot Act, which has strengthened the hand of law enforcement agencies to stop terrorists before they can act.

We need to treat each other with consideration. In my world, the squeaky wheel does not get the grease.