...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

What about you? Are you happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been?" "Of course I am." "Why?" "Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it's sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.

I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

Sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Without them, we'd be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.