It's hard to read real fiction. It takes time. It takes a sustained attention.

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 write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.

The people who make reality are angry peasants with old cannon shells wired together, an anti-vehicle device.

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

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