I love baseball. What I love about baseball is that you are always waiting.

When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.

Let's look at what the books are that are being produced. More and more they are being made like movies. To sell. They are being tested out.

If a writer is honest, if what is at stake for him can seem to matter to his readers, then his work may be read. But a writer will work anyway, as I do, and as I have, in part to explore this terra incognita, this dangerous ground I seem to need to risk.

Stephen King has the exact ability that Charles Dickens had. To get to his readers in spite of or despite anything the reviews say.

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.

If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.