I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave o….

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that hou….

That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can d….

but even the facts do not always tell the truth.

I like the sound a typewriter makes..

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names..

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence..

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and f….

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs..

A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know wh….

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been..

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously..

I know that what's happened in the election has changed American reality, and I understand that I have to change with it. I have to rethink how I liv….

It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers ….

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas..

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real..

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am m….

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes..

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time..

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that s….

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other ….