Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

I'm very sentimental about lobsters. The last lobster I ate was the only lobster I cooked.

People gave me such a bad time about wanting a baby. I didn't want a baby, and I still don't. I wanted a dog.

I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.

reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.