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.

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 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.

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

They are trying to take you back from me now, and they will—but only for a brief, little while—

You have to lose something to gain anything.

People say that Paris is the city of love, but for Raia, New York deserves the title more. It's imposible not to fall in love with the city like it's almost impossible not to fall in love in the city

Shame is an ornament to the young a disgrace to the old.

The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.

Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.

You feel your game's raised by working with the best people.

I just see myself as an athlete and a competitor, someone who just works really hard at trying to get better at golf.