“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…”

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.

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.

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

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.

Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O’Brian a Master of the Art.