The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.

She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.

She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time.

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

albert einstein quotes

We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.

Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.

Isolation offered its own form of companionship

Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.