Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

The quality of gifts depends on the sincerity of the giver.

Just because things hadn’t gone the way I had planned didn’t necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.

Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a visa.

The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.

…was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women…

I missed my mother’s father. Is that even possible? Maybe I had fallen asleep for a while. Maybe I was like her, just waking up and looking for him to be there. I wondered how...

If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.

The sleep he went back to was never the one he left.

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream...

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting...

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you...

It’s like a big circle. I’ve gone on a get-a-man crusade, but so far it’s been a disaster and I’m feeling as bad about myself as I ever have. I know I’m a great person...

Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to...

Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let’s say it’s so. Only a few of us are going...

There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the...

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

She’s growing up,” Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, I’m not. Everything is exactly the same.

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.

People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about...

I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140...

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness...

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It’s a plague. It’s like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it.”STATE OF WONDER

…as if the world had become a giant train station in which everything was delayed until further notice.

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to...

What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it’s the closest thing to being God you’re ever going to...

He was so close to her then that they owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their desire and worked to move them together.

He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward,...

They lived their lives only for the hour that lay ahead of them.

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the...

The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy’s circumstances it was sheer...

He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.

Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the...

We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.

I wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in...

…the terrible crumple and blanch of a lie come undone…

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a...

But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. … It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the...

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other...

Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It’s not their responsibility to figure out where...