I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.

I'd say writing is easier for me now than it once was, but I do less of it.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.