The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from the bent tip of a grass blade, looking for a route.

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I am insignificant.

What is the pattern of change?

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.

I'm not oblivious to that connotation of changing careers, so I'm just going in and doing the job. I think that you can't fake doing the job. All I want to do is deliver. That's my focus.

Just one thing has to change, and that's me staying healthy.

My credit card company says I have an outstanding balance. I'm flattered.

Anything is a temptation to those who dread it.

Teaching...can be likened to a conversation in which you listen to the speaker carefully before you reply.

Boy, you gotta be real sick to get this much attention.

You will hardly conquer, but conquer you must. [Lat., Male vincetis, sed vincite.]

The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.