He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never un….

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward..

I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight..

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following co….

That's important to me, to recommend books..

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for peo….

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should..

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important..

Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering..

One must not be shy where language is concerned..

He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and ….

Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps..

The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could….

I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked..

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fa….

Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere..

The love between humans is the thing that nails us to the earth..

You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds u….

I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write..

Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice..

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while y….