I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.