Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.