I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

I think talent has a huge amount to do with concentration, concentration rather than the athletic ability of your neurons. If you can concentrate on an esoteric piece of math, how can you think about the rest of your life? That's why people can leave their car keys in the gutter; they're in the midst of obsession and concentration.

You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

If someone doesn't like your fiction, it's really insulting.