The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.

In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.

I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.