Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.