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 f….

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

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

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room….

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness..

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there..

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘rea….

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

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in researc….

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for u….

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 ….

It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that lif….

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us..

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we….

Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way..

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you..

Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well..

Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale..

Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely com….