A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn't working.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.