When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. 
He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. 
This is one of the essential images in American mythology.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

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

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.