What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.

I don't think the world is particularly responsive to - our world, the culture we are in, to art right now.

You have to read history. You have to have a sense of history.

Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave.

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.

Hollywood is the model for publishing, more and more. Not just blockbusters either.