I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.

People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.

What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.

Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak's Broadway to Chicago.

That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.