“To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive.”

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.

Discovery is the joy.

So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings.

Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

College education gives you the chance to earn money and live thereupon. But, umless it destroys certain illusions that are nourished by the common level of mankind, your lives will not be happy.

My approach to the races hasn’t changed in my 20-year career. If I have the chance to attack and to pass, I do it, trying to get the best possible result.

Arsene Wenger asked me to have a trial with Arsenal when I was 17. I turned it down. Zlatan doesn’t do auditions.

The struggles I’m facing, The chances I’m taking, Sometimes might knock me down, But no, I’m not breaking.

Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.

The grace of God has no charms for men till the Holy Spirit gives them a taste for it.

But so far I have the feeling that the chances are there to repeat last year’s season.

If I had my life to live over, instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I’d have cherished ever moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.