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

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

I always had good students.

What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.

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

I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.