I think about the collaboration between writers and readers, but I also think about the collaboration between all the writers in a generation or in a country or across time contributing to this massive project of documenting and reimagining our world.

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that.

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

Teaching and writing, really, they support and nourish each other, and they foster good thinking. Because when you show up in the classroom, you may have on the mantle of authority, but in fact, you're just a writer helping other writers think through their problems. Your experience with the problems you've tried to solve comes into play in how you try to teach them to solve their problems.

It's very difficult, I think for most writers, to carve out the time and the kind of imaginative space to do the writing that you really want to do and also to be an active, engaged, compassionate, giving human being in the world, to the people around you and to your broader community.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.