In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you’re trying to work out.

Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in.

Safe trip. I love you. No kidding.

And I’m hoping there’s some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it – although I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I...

There’s an expectation these days that novels – like any other consumer product – should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur...

…with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there’s no need for secrecy.

She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn’t socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger […] their lives were so cloistered...

It’s not as if we’re running a hospital for sick children down here, let’s put it that way. Where’s the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul,...

You could study the connections for years and never work it out-it was all about things coming together,things falling apart,time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the...

I think it’s hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to – I mean, writing is a lonely business.

Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.

But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet...

I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entirely, and that’s not even to...

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It...

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that’s a hard lesson of reality.

The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.

…real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a...

We don’t like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than...

I’m not sure whay I’ve been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

Children – if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children – children lie all the time.

do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death.

But despite the gloss and sparkle of the job (champagne breakfasts, gift bags from Bergdorf’s) the hours were long and there was a hollowness at the heart of it that-I knew-made her sad.

And her laugh was enough to make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down the street.

Character, to me, is the life’s blood of fiction.

(“It’s crazy,” she’d said, “but I’d be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can’t think of a better way to go...

What’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one’s range as a writer, one’s technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.

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...