The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

The longest journey is not the journey from Asia to Antarctica, but it is the journey to know yourself.

Every major accomplishment in a man's life requires a major level of commitment.

You may not know my reasons, but you can assume I have them and be kind.

Why should I question the monkey when I can question the organ grinder.

I felt like on one hand the clarity of thought was amazing, but on the other we went during Antarctic summer, so the sun didn't set the whole time we were there.

It's cool to have instruments lying around because they give you different ideas.

True victory is victory over oneself.

Everything about us black people is complicated, us being here, being a minority, being a woman, all those things are complicated.

Turning a negative into a positive is an expressway to success.

We're all going to be victims of temptation at several points in our lives.