I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time.