I must love big novels, because that's what I've written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

I feel like someone after a deluge being asked to describe the way it was before the flood while I'm still plucking seaweed out of my hair.

The characters write the plot. Their natures do.

I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

...There is a school of thought, a heresy from the madhouse of heresies in the ninth century, that says God is good and is in control of every individual thing that happens, every event, but that unfortunately the devil is in control of the timing.