One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.

You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.