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.

…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.