Part of flirting is that you tend to give each other a little extra slack to be obscure - to say things that are suggestive and nuanced, rather than ….

Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from writing….

I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years!.

When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in the same sit….

Love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don't get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things-and ….

If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval chivalric romance, when actually he lives in six….

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his fav….

There is salvation - happiness and virtue - in beauty. I would define beauty in this context as a kind of richness, complexity, mystery, diversity, o….

There's an amazing line in Marcus Aurelius: "The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the….

I think it's true that, as is often observed, the writer is always an outsider. A writer is someone who is telling stories about what's going on, whi….

Nom de Plume uses the device of the pseudonym to unite the likes of Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, Fernando Pessoa, and Patricia Highsmith into a cohe….

I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or ch….

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of h….

One of the things that really impressed me about Anna Karenina when I first read it was how Tolstoy sets you up to expect certain things to happen - ….

When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that somethin….

I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever d….

As a grad student and later as a writer, I have found it hard to sustain the pure, almost erotic love of reading I had as a kid - you know, where you….

If you're writing a book where you want to make a positive truth claim, then you should absolutely call it nonfiction or memoir. If you don't want to….

I try really hard to cultivate the pure love of reading, to make time for it, because it would be really sad to still be a writer without remembering….

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the sam….

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're ….