Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

She loved you in the morning because the day was new.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.

When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."