Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.
Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.
It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it “intently political.” I’m just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.
It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
I’m never going to tell the reader what to believe; I’m going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.
We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.