We all have some ideological quotient in ourselves. And I think it does guide who we are.

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?

Most people will reach a point where, whatever their ideology, they will relent, or conform, and that keeps them kind of in the general mass of people. And for those who find that they can't, all of sudden they leave the general mass, they find that they become exceptions, and exceptional, and often this makes them public.

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel.

If the fidelity [ in a book] isn't maintained, the reader will think your structure is extraneous, or superficial, or that you're trying to curry favor, or live up to the expectations of some sort of genre or structure.

I think there are differences between men and women. There is more of a softness to women than there is to men, especially when it comes to those more intimate emotions: feeling love, feeling familial connections.

There are books like Darkness at Noon, which from the prose standpoint I don't think is a perfect book. It has flaws. But for its time, it was very politically courageous.