Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.