I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

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.

...wanting soul life without the dark, warming intelligence of personal doubt is like expecting an egg without the brooding heat of the mother hen.

Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.

I read much more that I do anything else. I don't watch too much television, because I like books.

I function better when my back is to the wall.

I'm conservative on some issues, and I'm progressive on others.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

The meaning of life is 'the ultimate questioner's vanity.'

All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.

Sovereign of beauty, like the spray she grows;Compass'd she is with thorns and canker'd bower.Yet, were she willing to be pluck'd and worn,She would be gather'd, though she grew on thorn.

Edward helped, making faces every so often at the raw ingredients-human food was mildly repulsive to him.