Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance.

Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumb….

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain….

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inw….

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage..

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction..

If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be….

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity..

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find..

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like..

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you s….

Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically..

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude..

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect..

The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, w….

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I ….

This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating….

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. Bu….

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest..

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual..

But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone..