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.

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

it is easy to surpass a predecessor, but difficult to avoid being surpassed by a successor.

A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

Dreams are of no value if they don't have wings and feet.

The science of the laws is the slow growth of time and experience.

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.

Since nothing is so secret or hidden that it cannot be revealed, everything depends on the discovery of those things that manifest the hidden.

Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.

Some rules are bigger than the universe.

Was it really this easy, once you escaped, to just not care?

Excellent value relative to the week investment of time....To my mind, this is the definitive course on leadership.