There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if hes any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.