I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

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

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.