One of my favorite pieces of advice about being a writer came from a very formative teacher I had as an undergraduate, named John Hersey. On our last day of class together, which was also John Hersey last day before retirement, he said, "Remember, the world doesn't need any new writers." Which at first didn't seem like great advice, but when you unpacked it, it was really that it's not enough to be confident in what you do; be conscious of bringing something to the world of readers and writers that it hasn't seen before. Something idiosyncratic.

Another big moment in terms of that feeling was David Petraeus: if the director of the CIA can't get away with having a secret relationship, then what hope do you have? It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.

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.

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.

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.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

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.