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.

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?

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

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Convert everything around you into meaningful products

Our ultimate finishing line in life is death! Whilst you have life, work hard and trust God!

Cesare persuaded King Louis to lend him an entire army to defeat me. I'm flattered.

...Pomeranians speak only to Poodles and Poodles speak only to God.

There must be justice, sensed and shared by all peoples, for, without justice the world can know only a tense and unstable truce.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table.

So few people did good in their lives. It was depressing.

I believe a radiant, light-filled tomorrow should be normal to the experience of living.