Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.

But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.

The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.