Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?

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.

I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.

Someone wise told me recently that Adulting was hard. My response: TRUE STORY

Development is maintenance.

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue, an everlasting vision of the ever changing view.

You'll see why, in animation circles, Miyazaki himself is considered one of the gods.

Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.

To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic.

Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan - spoiled.

An innocent person is really like a magnet and it attracts, he attracts, the people towards himself, just like a flower attracts a bee towards itself.

Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.