The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.