There are some advantages to being a writer: you do generally get better as you get older. I think I understand things better. When I was a kid, I was kind of guessing at the emotion. Now I'm interested in writing more difficult books, books that confront the facts of life, of death and dying and failure - the majority of life. You write outwardly imaginative books when you're younger. When you're older you apply imagination to internal experience.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

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

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.

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 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.