“A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states”

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions – adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers – none can equal the Internet.

I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes

I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…

It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it

I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.

Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.

The peak of intensity is numbness not emotionless.

If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.

Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

The successful men of today are men of one overmastering idea, one unwavering aim, men of single and intense purpose.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation.

The intensity of a fire, or a heavy concentration, to be a leader, you have to be able to concentrate on that fire and move just as soon as it stops or the last round hits.

Short term intensity cannot replace long term commitment.