A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.