In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.

Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

I know this will sound naïve, but I often wonder what America would be like if our national ethos was simply to minimize suffering. Period. To try, every day, to convert our wonderful wealth and national energy into the cessation of suffering wherever we find it. Imagine if that was our national mindset. Well, we can-we must-dream.

Certainly we're always rooting for our particular contingent moment to be a great one. Pain-free. But the more expansive vision has to include the idea that, even for us, sometimes our particular contingent moment is going to be horrific.

I don't know about transformation. But scientifically you can say: Well, it doesn't seem to hurt anybody. Personally I've been cheered by books at really critical moments. That much I believe.

I believe that, when [meeting of writer and reader] happens and the reader goes out into the world the next day, there's some alteration that might possibly inflect the person positively.