It now appears that the world is filled with people who believe that everyone should be interested in everything they have to say about anything - people who tweet, you might call them. I find this so astonishing, my own hubris pales in comparison.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.