The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

We have to admire the world for not ending on us.