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

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

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.

In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.

What makes a sentence, a phrase, a moment, or a scene delightful? Something about recognizing the truth in it, hearing the music in it, understanding, intuitively perhaps, that the words are just right. It's not a matter of even context - delight is not limited to scenes or descriptions of happiness or beauty - but of aesthetic appreciation of the thing itself. As a reader, I find it's that moment when I want to stop reading, and also that moment when I know I can't. Delight is that it's what takes me by surprise and reminds me why I love the literary arts above all others.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.