To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.

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.

Walk in the light while you have the light.

My mother was always in the center of her own agitation, seeming as though, far away, part of her was being chased along a dirt road by a swarm of bees.

Crazy always feels right, but that doesn't mean it ain't wrong.

It is of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.

Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.

My father hauled boxes so I could get an education and earn enough money to pay someone to make me lift weights.

Trust is fine, but control is better.

Life's too short to drink crappy coffee and cry over boys who don't care.

Well, I'm clearly not ugly.

If you know where your next meal is coming from, you are not poor.