There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer'.

I love the feeling of being on the hunt - the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.

What's really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

It blew my mind, reading Swing Time, that I could take any sentence in the book, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences written in English.

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.