I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving.

I've never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

She was a monster, but she was my monster.

reading is not a passive act. It's a creative act. It's a relationship between the writer and a person the writer will probably never meet. I think it's very wrong to write in a way that leaves no room for the reader to maneuver. I don't want to get in the way. What I'd really like to do is to perform the Indian Rope Trick - go higher and higher and eventually disappear.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.