I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.

You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person.

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

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.