What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I’d outgrown the novel I’d once been so happy to live in

You’re either reading a book or you’re not.

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the ‘real’ world? I didn’t need curing, and the world didn’t, either; the only thing that did need curing...

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That’s what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that’s...

There’s hardly anybody who doesn’t hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn’t hate.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

there are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author’s story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from...

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were...

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it’s absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.

The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And...

When I’m writing I don’t want anyone else in the room – including myself.

By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn’t understand what had happened to him. He felt like...

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight – isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and...

I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I’m in favor of the music industry … standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not...

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

Det var det der holdt mig vågen om natten,” sagde Walter. “Den her opsplitning af landet. For det er det samme problem overalt. Det er ligesådan med internettet eller kabel-tv – der er aldrig noget...

And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an a weight, and a temperature,...

THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate...

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it,...

Du skal bare huske at det ikke er en perfekt krig i en perfekt verden.

Believe me,’ […] ‘I would know about it. That’s the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No...

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is...

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that...

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.

She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable....

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely...

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness,...

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of...

Walter had never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize...

Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.

Reading Chip’s college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he’d bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of...

You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like...

the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page,...

Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.

The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance —...

The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn’t understand antiques or architecture, she couldn’t draw like Sylvia, she didn’t read...

El amor consiste en una empatía ilimitada, surgida de lo que el corazón nos revela, que el otro es tan real como nosotros. Y por eso el amor, según lo entiendo, siempre es concreto. Intentar...

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It took hours to turn the clock back 30 seconds.

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying...