I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that's normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of human suffering, and with that comes forgiveness, and with forgiveness comes love.

I truly believe the art's larger than the artist. Who cares about John Steinbeck? I care about the Joad family.