I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.

feeling - probably for the first time in my life - the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what's going to happen or when.

Every time I try to set something in Chicago, I get intimidated by 'Augie March.' It's easy to set something in Indianapolis - we don't have 'Augie March' here. But I love writing about Chicago, and I love being there and imagining lives in Chicago. I hope to set something there in the future, but it's intimidating.

I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.

Our children are weird. Nicely phrased.