You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.