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

There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.

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.

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.