"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.