Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I ….

I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our….

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it..

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in y….

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life..

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up..

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to ….

You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and ta….

If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable..

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full….

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in singl….

A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you ….

You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love..

A flower is a plant's way of making love..

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversatio….

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from t….

The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant..

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family….

You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . .….

If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the ….

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now..