Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.

Kenneth Branagh. There was a time in my life when people would tell me constantly that I look like him. I could do a lot worse than that.

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

You just noticed? You're slow...

People are moving into modes of participation and self-generation, which apply to everything from museums and television to architecture.

My guess is my brother would call his mom and his dad pretty regularly, a lot more than I probably did.

Art exists only to communicate a spiritual message

The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.

I was disappointed if I didn't have a chance to win a game, and if I had the chance and didn't do it.

Love which is only an episode in the life of men, is the entire history of the life of women.

Man takes a great deal of pains to heap up riches, and they are but like heaps of manure in the furrows of the field, good for nothing unless they be spread.

There are many pitfalls in the marathon of life. But regardless of what you go through, you can count on God's sustaining grace.

I love that moment when I feel a connection to another person, however brief or insignificant.