I don't want to recover from writing this book [The Onion]. I feel very poised. I feel like I'm with my mother for the first time ever. I feel like I've confronted her, and the confrontation goes on.

If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.

I don't have children. I serve the world and I serve God by living as deep within my work as I can, reveling in the language of other times and putting it forth for the world.

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

You try to learn who you are. You work hard. You've either got it or you don't when it comes to writing books. And you tend to only get these things if you want them, and want them to the exclusion of everything else.

Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.

I wanted to portray a newly democratized, enclosed society. I wanted to show how extraordinarily fluid people are in their embrace of other human beings.