I can't say that you should extract this or that value from my books explicitly. They are up for interpretation. In terms of the obligation, I think we're all individuals on this planet, trying to scratch our way through the day, and if you're writing a book exposing atrocities in Rwanda or writing a murder mystery set in a mountain village, I think both ways of spending you time are valid and both books are probably fine to read.

For years I felt that I wasn't ready to take on slavery. It's a huge topic, and I didn't want to mess it up.

I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.

Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.

If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.

There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.

I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.