He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for more.

Guns are dangerous and damaging even when no one gets shot. They really do loom.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.

He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.