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.

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

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.

My father actually went to college, and my mother went to nursing school, so, you know. I wouldn't... They were actually too square and right-wing to be hip, too well-educated to be white trash, too sexy to be square. They really didn't fit any mold. They weren't really hipsters. They were just - they were two of a kind, those two.

I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.

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.

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.