Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.