I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.

Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.

My aunt used to say, "It's between me and my god; it's got nothing to do with you." It was a good enough answer for me as a snot-nosed college kid angling for a religious debate, and I still think it's a good way of putting it.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .