I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

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.

As the filmmaker, yes, I have to look out for everybody. But I don't have to know everybody's approach.

Give guilt - the gift that lasts forever.

By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.

Any story worth telling is worth exaggerating.

I log out of Twitter on my computer so I have to log in and then I log back out.

Jazz is like a great blues band that fell down the stairs

We all do better, when we all do better.

A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.

The most successful people on the planet have failed more than ordinary ones.

One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn't is competitors.