The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.

In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.

It's harder to get hold of the world. It's harder to understand the world, to encompass the literature necessary for the information.

I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.

The culture is with some rapidity fearing its imagination. I don't know why. Imagination is not of interest.

I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.

History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.