“My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay...” — Amy Waldman Quote

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan.

I wasted years worrying about what other people thought.

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

The Internet can bring us much closer to the developed world.

I love the Bronte sisters, but I feel a closer kinship to the Ephron sisters, Nora and Delia, if only because their work makes me laugh more than the Brontes. I also love the Mitford sisters with their secret language and their endless letters back and forth.

I find the closer you get to people, the harder it is to satirise them.

My failures may be my greatest successes. It is in failure that I have often drawn closer to God, learn to depend more on Him than myself, gained self-knowledge, and seen things in their right perspective.

I mean astronomically, that one doesn't even make sense. Because if you shoot for the moon, you're not going to land on the stars. The moon is closer than all of the stars.