The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

There is much to be said for solitude.

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

Words matter, words have import.

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

I also knew that the deep rumble rolling through us was only nerves, a sensitivity to imagined repercussion, as if a sound were built into revenge.

seven times down eight times up like the Daruma doll

The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.

Wealth--the most excellent of all gods.

People are best convinced by things they themselves discover.

Anyway that other thing we almost did in Paris-that's probably off the table for a while.Unless you want that whole baby-I'm-on-fire-when-we kiss thing to become freakishly literal

Learning, undigested by thought, is labor lost.

Set out to do three or four things this year with gusto and excellence, rather than doing a dozen things just sufficiently. Trust me on this.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one's thoughts change.