With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it.

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.

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

The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.

I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.

My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.