Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

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

[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapped a woman. They're interrogating her, and they put a plastic bag over her head. They're suffocating her, and I'm thinking, It's six o'clock in the morning! Why does anybody need to see this? How can I find the off switch?

I don't really do anything with the Internet except check my email. I have a much higher opinion of humanity because of that.

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.

The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.

In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.