You’d be surprised, Theo.” she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, “what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You’re the one who has to...

He’s a funny one,” said Ida. “Here’s how he sound.” She pursed her lips and, expertly, imitated the red-winged blackbird’s call: not the liquid piping of the wood thrush, which dipped down into the dry...

It’s commonplace to say that we ‘love’ a book, but when we say it, we mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in out youth, though we...

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary....

It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they’re learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him-he wasn’t painting that bird from his mind, you know? That’s a real little guy, chained up...

They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not...

When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning,...

Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

…it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.” p28

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.

I really do work in solitude.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian’s. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when...

I hated being around people, couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn’t talk to clients, couldn’t tag my pieces, couldn’t ride the subway, human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill...

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking...

…the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.

Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.

Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not...

The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I...

What if — is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can...

I’d rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the...

[T]hough the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came,...

Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It...

Well — think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no — hang on — this is a...

If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because...

…I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story....

The books I loved in childhood – the first loves – I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

Es muy ruso quejarse continuamente de lo mal que van las cosas. Si la vida te va bien, cállatelo. No vayas a tentar al diablo…

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from...

Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens.

I believe having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially

(…) a vida – para além do mais que possa ser – é curta. (…) o destino é cruel e talvez não aleatório. (…) a morte ganha sempre, mas isso não quer dizer que tenhamos...

It was a myth you couldn’t function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point...

I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and...

[art] those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

…life – whatever else it is – is short… maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool,...

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn’t. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice – by work.

Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.

It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you...