I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.

I don't tend to work directly from life, except in trying to mimic or match the outlines of its insanity. In other words, when I live through something, I just try to say to myself, "OK, remember this - life is really this crazy or scary or beautiful or surprising - so try to 'get at' that in your stories.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

Compassion doesn't have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.

Nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that's going on now in America, that it's always been chaos - people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It's the scale that's amazing, and also the proximity to our own time.