And, lying on my bed in some biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel even how my sadness can...

Or–to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad’s: sometimes you have to lose to win.

La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.

The dead appear to us in dreams because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from...

Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were winging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out...

But it’s for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world “postmodernist.

Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in...

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

You are – all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one’s put into it.

…as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again

And if what they say is true–if every great painting is really a self-portrait–what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

…a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

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

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

It seemed my wholelife was composed of these disjointedfractions of time, hanging around in onepublic place and then another, as if I werewaiting for trains that never came. And, likeone of those ghosts who are...

Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so...

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my...

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

. . . is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

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.