“I work, and then I leave the office, and I’m with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don’t feel like I’m exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.”

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I’ve come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.

My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of.

Being with him was like being alone underwater – everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I’ve always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife’s a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

I’m an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard’s books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work – the pursuit of darkness, the negative – and I think in some sense I’ve internalised that as what one is supposed to do.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can’t just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.

I’m interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or ‘explains,’ the larger mysteries of religion.

You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I’d said that, how many times I’d meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

If it hadn’t been for the rise of the working woman’s wardrobe, I never would have found the time to sneak a kid in.

High school wasn’t so bad though because, by then, I had worked out that there were far more nerdy kids and poor kids than there were rich, popular kids, so, at the very least, we had them outnumbered.

Every day I watched how a bare metal frame, rolling down the line would come off the other end, a spanking brand new car.

I always saw myself as a big-nosed, big-eared kid. I’ve never tried to kind of capitalize on that stuff. I think a lot of people do when they can.

Kids have what I call a built-in hypocrisy antenna that comes up and blocks out what you’re saying when you’re being a hypocrite.

When you have kids you want to be able to go to movies and take the family too, and actually all enjoy it together. I don’t think there are that many great, live action family movies that everybody can enjoy.

I come from a large family so you can count on the fact that I’m going to have more kids.

Maybe it’s because I was an only child, but I’ve always wanted kids.