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

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

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.

It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering.

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.

...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.