But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It’s a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life‘s manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I’m fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

I’ve been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

If there is an abiding theme in ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’ it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people‘s past histories.

We can rarely tell others what we really think about them–not just because it would so wound them, but also because it would so wound ourselves.

There is much to be said for solitude.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren’t they?

I want to be a popular novelist who‘s also serious, or a serious novelist who’s also very accessible.

We don’t like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to….because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we’d rather not hear.

We all want to fix things. Just as we all believe that so much in life can be rectified. Mend fences, build bridges, reach out, engage in mutual healing.