The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

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.

I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

Hungry ears are sharp ones.

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.