We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

The thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional intelligence, the ethics, the beauty. It's all there. It's all so fully contained in a novel that succeeds. But at the same time, I understand the impulse to put away childish things.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

The whole time I was writing, I had to fight my normal inclination to be funny, to sort of patch humor in, in order to convey all of the disruptions of the disease to the family dynamic, the loss of individuality, the impact on professional life, and the sanity of the main character. Of course, that's not to say it never sneaks in; there's some black comedy in there, like when he shows up to court wearing a bicycle helmet and won't take it off.

Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.

I think one of the ways you avoid being angry is to avoid being angry at the people in power. They might do crappy things, and piss you off, and make bad decisions, but they shouldn't be hated simply because they're in power. And I thought it was important to humanize them if the book was going to be even-handed to all the different ways you encounter people at work.

If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?