Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

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

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.