Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard..

I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. F….

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected..

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?.

I certainly have written a lot about police in my life, and it's not only something that I know about, but always something that interests me..

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

The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the gro….

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to slee….

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 ….

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words..

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..

I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again..

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….

You can't be a jerk in order to be a good writer..

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..

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned..

For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to ….

Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized..

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someo….

Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when ….

You are always someones favorite unfolding story.