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.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

Popularity has become its own justification.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.