People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away..

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves..

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing..

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit..

I never change, I simply become more myself..

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make o….

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul..

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst..

In love there are two things - bodies and words..

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality..

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read..

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in….

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of ….

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love..

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions..

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look..

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole..

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor..

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat..

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity..

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are..