We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it-passion-is one of those things that you have an endless amount of-like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again.

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

The past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people-if only they'd stop writing.

Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight–the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.