So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.

I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.