Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.

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.

We don't know Where God is, Who God is or What God is… BUT GOD IS! -RVM

No declaration changes the existence of God

Don't be fooled, Clara. No one's new and shiny. Not really.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

I just don't want to get used to feeling this feeling, you know, losing basketball games.

Most people that work in [show] business, if they're not gypsies by nature, become gypsies, just because of the reality of this business.

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

Fatherhood: How God blesses you out of your selfishness and floods your soul with love, all while reminding you how little you know.

In love, anger is always false.

Peace will be victorious.