“Discovery is the joy.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Serendipity is the way to make discoveries, by accident but also by sagacity , of things one is not in quest of.

Painting is self-discovery.

This [discovery of a cell-free yeast extract] will make him famous

The ‘Mythbusters’ crew, we monitor the Discovery boards, we look for the new ideas that are being forwarded on those boards, and we keep track of what’s going on, we keep updated.

The discovery of dance has changed my life in unimaginable ways.

Arithmetic starts with the integers and proceeds by successively enlarging the number system by rational and negative numbers, irrational numbers, etc…

Quantum physics really begins to point to this discovery. It says that you can’t have a Universe without mind entering into it, and that the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.