I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

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.

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.

I've had a lot of glamour come my way in the last 10 years - you know, movie stars and mansions and red carpets and trips to Europe and crazy stuff I never would have imagined - and I look at them as if I'm the bartender in the corner of the room. They've never gone into my psyche. I look at them with distance, and wonder.

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.