Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.

What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.