I think suspense should be like any other color on a writers palette. I suppose Im in the minority but I think its crazy for literary fiction to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors.

No one gets to tell you what your life means!

I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.

Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.

His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.

He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.