The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence. When you're handwriting, you really just have to move on.

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

I don't want to make it sound too much like I'm telling people how to read the book A Thousand Pardons, but what Ben Armstead is doing, he's doing more or less on purpose as a very elaborate way of making a sacrifice in his personal life. He needs to start over. This is how he chooses to do it - by blowing up where he is.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.

I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.

I worry that's what people are going to think about me if they kind of go backwards. But if that didn't happen to you, I'll feel better.