You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

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.

YOU are important. You are special. You are loved. GOD has a plan for your life! Find out what it is and you'll experience a depth of fulfillment you never thought possible.

America needs jobs, smaller government, less spending and a president with the courage to offer more than yet another speech.

Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terrible bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

When I was a child of six or seven my father would show me the chapter in the prophet Isaiah where the name Immanuel is found; more than once he spoke to me of the faith he put in me.

I think America, really, is over.

I hate that whole Tarantino thing about beating up women and killing them and chopping up. Just because you have the mind of a 12 year old.

Lolitas value independence and beauty above all else.

A flag doesn't cause someone to sit in a prayer meeting for an hour, and then stand up and shoot people.

Radio interviews are really snappy and I'm just bad at that. I just close down.