I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!

With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.