The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.

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

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

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

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

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.

It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.