Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.