Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.

To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT, intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It produced a certain sort of person of which I was a typical specimen: the mental contortionist, able to rise to almost every challenge placed before him, except the challenge of real self-knowledge.

One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.

The future of time, of how it's won or lost, endured or enjoyed, expanded or compressed, will depend on how it's valued, not how it's measured.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

My big philosophy is: Try and work with good people, because the process is your life. That's going to be really, really hard. I'm glad I learned the lesson, 'Failure is OK.'

Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.

This life is a test, and we're put down here to make choices. The truth is, the bad choices of other people can hurt us.