There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

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.

To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.