Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love.

I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days. A push/pull regime of weightlifting, cycling, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday run with my oldest son, even if it's cold out.

I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup... A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.