The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.

When someone can love without judging, he is truly wise.

All great roads are paved with uncomfortable memories.

Of course I know very little about architecture, and the older I get the less I know.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

I learned that not only am I a descendant of slaves, but that I am also a descendant of royalty, that there are politicians from the 1800s as well as Tuskegee Airmen in my lineage.

Radishes grow just about anywhere. People think, 'Oh it's just a radish.' But radishes are delicious, and people don't think of cooking them.

Fashion is like eating. You shoudn't stick with the same menu.

"...arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and as a matter of law, unsupportable."

I met my fathers in prison, they too a part of a scene; digging death.

I believe when it comes to love, there's something intangible about who we are attracted to, and I don't think I have a pattern.