The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

(You) don't leave the chicken to watch the feed.

One does not know where love will take you.

Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.