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.

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.

Fiction that intends to be something other than entertainment has a certain obligation, I think, to convince the reader, every time, that what is to be evoked - character, experience, idea - is worthy of his or her consideration, intellectual energy, close attention.

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

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.

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!

As a writer, I'm too busy and worried to experience the delight while composing my own work, although, of course, I hope a reader will find something of it when the work is complete. But I do try to figure out where in their experiences certain characters of mine, who are not necessarily readers, and certainly not writers or artists, find an equivalent sensation: of delight, of astonishment, of whatever it is that briefly - and brevity seems essential - reassures us, connects us, sends a shiver of inarticulate recognition down our spines: Oh, yes: life.