The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator..

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people..

Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves i….

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

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

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 ….

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..

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

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….

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….

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….

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

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….

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..

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

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

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

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 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….

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….

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