My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

I think that people all grow up and have their same personalities, but you can say, "Oh, I can see the roots of this personality, which I didn't like, but then you grew up, and I can still see you as that person, but I do really like you now." Which is sort of how I feel about children - I mean, about children who I knew when I was a child and grew up with, and they're still my friends, and children that I know as children who I see growing up, and every year I like them more.

If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

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.

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.