“If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.”

People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.

I am very interested in loyalty, even if the person to whom one is loyal is flawed, criminal, or otherwise in the wrong.

I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.

It annoys the hell out of me when people say, This is the kitchen, and this is the bathroom. What am I, Helen Keller? I mean, it’s pretty obvious when you’re in a kitchen and when you’re not.

It’s my policy not to review funerals.

Sometimes you can do things for others that you can’t do for yourself.

A lot of people get flipped out if you’re quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don’t start interrogating you, they start talking, going on and on about stuff that’s totally irrelevant, and the silence gets so big and loud that it’s scary.

Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.

You really can’t write well if you’re thinking about what the reviewers might say.

I’m very interested in compassion – compassion for oneself and others. I write about very complicated characters and experiences and try to do it without judging the character or the action.

I’m nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

I’d say our ability to supersize emotions are American-made special effects. In European countries, people mostly stay close to home and whatever rage there is simmers under the surface – it’s what made the plays of Shakespeare and Harold Pinter so good.

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better – does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

Trust yourself and in the universe that everything will work out in the end.

Perfect love will never want the preeminence in everything, it will never want to take the place of another, it will always be willing to take the back seat.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

When doing everything according to indications, although things may not turn out agreeably to indication, we should not change to another while the original appearances remain.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Everything happens for a reason and that reason is there to assist me.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.