Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

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 prettier than you can imagine.

Be the person you are, not the one others try to create.

That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.

Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

It is deeply shocking and incomprehensible to me that despite volumes of documentation and living witnesses who can attest to the horrors of the Holocaust, there are still those who would deny it.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

The whole new Democratic Party is the old Republican Party. We have a whole bunch of elephants running around in donkey's clothes.

A Gothic church is a petrified religion.

I went to New York for a research trip, just because it has these iconic street canyons. It's one of the few cities that has sidewalks that are wide enough for a sea of umbrellas to be there.

The tragic incident of Luis Salom reminds us that our sport, our passion, is dangerous. We know it but, in a way, we don't think about it.