Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.

You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.

The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.