When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.

When you're out there in America, meeting with regular people, it's a pretty mellow, relaxed, kind-hearted country. The direction from the top, from the President, is following mean-spirited tendencies: fear and undue caution and distrust of the other, so it's very depressing.

Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque. So you get that kind of shortfall between the actual experience of the writer and the things he's hungry to express and the voice itself.

Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid.

We've got a real problem with social media that we didn't know we were going to have. It's almost like the demons have gotten out of the box.

Social media sometimes feels like a vehicle for one-dimensional sniping, more than true criticism.

In the Buddhist texts, some of them say, when you die, basically that wild horse gets cut loose, and the mind is incredibly powerful and expansive, omniscient and can go anywhere and see anything, but - and this is the catch - it's colored by the habits of thought we made in life.