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

You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.

The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focus, I think, on fewer books, with more pressure on each book to succeed. With that there comes, I think, a certain pressure towards shapeliness in fiction. Towards neatness. And I think writers feel that, and it can effect how they write.

Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.

He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.

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

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.