Maybe the most provocative thing one can do - and I'm not the first one to do it - is to ask the moral and philosophical question: why are some people better than others? Why are some people more moral than others?

People everywhere feel differently at different times of their lives.

Incident at Vichy, one of my favorite Arthur Miller plays, is a play in which you look at all of the different perspectives of this moral question. And it isn't so easy to decide which position is correct.

I think having an uncompromising ideology eventually forces you out of the norm.

Language is a personality as well. People are different when they speak different languages.

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel. The author is aware that there's a certain amount of information she/he has to provide in order to satisfy the reader, knowing that she/he has set something up that must be paid off, but this payment must be made while maintaining fidelity to the characters.

I spent seven years writing The Free World. There are a lot of things I accomplished there that I'm very proud of, but I didn't want to spend another seven years writing a book like that.