I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

"War gives men a plain-and-simple something to do ... Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate." It's a romantic manifesto.

I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.

Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?

I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.

I wanted things. Whatever it cost and whatever it took, I would do it. And that's it.

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.