“Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.”

“The kind of hope that I often think about…I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. It is a dimension of the soulIt’s not essentially dependent upon some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

“By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.”

“Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. ”

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”