Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

I've stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I'm still not sure that I've stayed in an English country house.

It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.

A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.