If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and it gets really, really bleak looking.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.

There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return

This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.

He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.

My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.

There is no guilt in feelings ever.

A boy has a natural genius for combining business with pleasure.

Just tell me what to do. I don't know where I'm going, but I know I don't want to be here.

I write as the birds sing, because I must, and usually from the same source of inspiration.

I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.

Often the true hero and heroines of my books are the houses, the places, the communities where people find a home.

People are like, Hey, Jeff, lemme tell you... I'm like, Hold on, let me get a pen and a piece of paper.

I went to New Zealand this year, and, whew man, I know a lot of people want to go there. But let me just tell you, it's 22 hours by plane. So, if you have the opportunity, don't.

I have heard of reasons manifold Why Love must needs be blind, But this the best of all I hold,- His eyes are in his mind.

Capitalism is about the mutual creation of wealth rather than the pillaging of it.