Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.

Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.