More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

What looks tragic might be comic on second consideration, and what is comic might bring tears in time.

I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.

As much as I've produced it looks to people like I must have written quickly, but it isn't that - because I put in in a sixty- or seventy-hour week.

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost. When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on signs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.

I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.

Never, never try to scope the market.