what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.

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.

The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

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