Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.