Celebrity doesn't have anything to do with art or craft. It's about being rich and thinking that you're better than everybody else.
I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.
I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives.
Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that.
Accept that there are things in this world we can never explain and life will be understandable. That is the irony of life. It is also the beauty of it.
The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to 'tidy up' the mess, as opposed to understanding it's a 'day one' issue and part of everything.
I am an American. I love this country.
When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery: today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.