Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.