Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are.

Be ready for reconciliation after quarrels.

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

People just don't understand how obsessed I am with winning.

They might kill me but they cannot kill Gandhism. If truth can be killed, Gandhism can be killed.

I'm not Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Those guys walk into a room and the room changes. I think there's something more... not average, but everyman about me.

Work is an anchor; it prevents the undisciplined minds drifting to the past. It keeps them in the present time.

I suppose I have an active imagination, and writing allows me to live it out.

So where in the old economy, content was king, in the new economy, context is king.