Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

God is Maker of heaven and earth.

It’s like we have the bones of animals and the hearts of angels.

All I do know is that as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier...much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusing to do that sorting rises higher and higher.

Doing anything worthwhile will present challenges, but everyone who achieves their goal is an ordinary person who becomes extraordinary.

Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.

Only sheep need a Shepard.

The glut of information that is spayed at us on a daily basis is an important factor in the formation of our ideologies, and it's not even actually happening in front of us.

I don't spend a lot of time here in New York. I didn't realize there were so many Bruins fans in New York.

There is a wealth of knowledge to be understood from others' work, don't get me wrong, and when I do stumble upon others' work, it's not lost on me.

Defeat exists but not suffering. A true warrior knows that when he loses a battle, he is improving the skill with which he wields a sword. He will be able to fight more skilfullly next time.