“I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.”

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.

The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms – the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them.

My first book, ‘The Age of Wire and String,’ came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

Every day, parents and teachers ask me, ‘How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?’ The honest answer is, I don’t know.

Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going.

Its a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.

I think people have had the understanding for many years that whatever happens with the separation of parents, that the kids automatically go to the mother. The fathers don’t know their rights.

I think you really have to become a parent to understand what you will endure to be there for your kids.

There is no job more important than parenting. This I believe.

The most important thing of all is my parents were able to leave all four of their children better off than themselves. That story has a name, it’s called the American dream.

Everything that I will ever accomplish, I owe to God, to my parent’s sacrifices, and to the United States of America.