I love thrillers. I would even read certain science fiction, although I haven't been a devotee for many years.

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

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.

I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.

Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"

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

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