It's hard to find cheap labor in the land of the brave and free. And the only thing that's better, that's if they work for free.

Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home -- when your personal clouds don't move but hang -- can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.

Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?

Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew.

In order to write novels for a living -- it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.

The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.

Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.

Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged.

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.