Sometimes it’s about playing a poor hand well.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to – I mean, writing is a lonely business.

There’s an expectation these days that novels – like any other consumer product – should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

My novels aren’t really generated by a single conceptual spark; it’s more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that’s a hard lesson of reality.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial

I’d rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

I really do work in solitude.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great

Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

I’d always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There’s nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn’t want to take, but took anyway.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there’s no need for secrecy.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn’t. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice – by work.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they’re learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

The books I loved in childhood – the first loves – I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you’re trying to work out.

It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people‘s comments will influence what happens.

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.