There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

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.

And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.

When I hear Hillary Clinton talking about what she is planning to do, why hasn't she done it for the last 30 years?

When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty.

The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts.

Sunshine is a welcome thing. It brings a lot of brightness.

As soon as there's pain, you know the gold is just beneath.

I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.

What the American worker needs is more of what WalMart offers and less of what the government offers.

Actually, I vote Labour, but my butler's a Tory.

We can't see and we can't reach the frontiers of our ignorance; we can only approach to it by extending our knowledge.