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.

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.

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 surrounded by story.

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.

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.