It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.

It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.