How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

But the past is long, and the future is short.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.

We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.

I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.

To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

Technology implies belligerence.

Eat some food.

visionaries lives between 2 extremes

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

The guy is a stud with women just following him around wherever he goes. But he is the last one who'll ask anyone to do anything for him. He'd rather just go do it himself.

God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.

[Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.

Chatter about art is almost always useless.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

I don't care how much money you have in the world. It's not about that. It's all about time.