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

History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.

The education of young people is narrowing. They cannot have the scope they used to have. They are being taught in high school by people earnest, still, but maybe less well-prepared than we would want them to be - but not because they are stupid or churlish.

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.

Baseball is a game where you are always waiting, and then when something happens it's like turning a kaleidoscope when you were a kid.

I always had good students.

I get to meet writers, and I love writers.