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..

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….

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the ….

I will write my way into another life..

That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter con….

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

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

I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels….

No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater ….

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise. Whereas now when people come up to me, they say, "I love the bookstore" and "Kids! Come here, come here….

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise..

You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life..

Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith..

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months..

I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life..

I think that people all grow up and have their same personalities, but you can say, "Oh, I can see the roots of this personality, which I didn't like….

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go..

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….

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….

Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom..

Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you..