I read on a Kindle. I must be of the opinion that the new way to read is a pretty good way to read. It's a new way. Those of us who like the smell of books get upset but nevertheless this is the way we're going.

Gustave Flaubert said, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi." It is not possible to write something you are not, but to have a new form, with a different hair color and a new body ... I do very little of that. That's why I keep bringing up the same people. I haven't given myself a hard time about it. But I can't make six new characters instead of one.

Did the nineteenth-century novelists create more generously than we do now? In a general reading of contemporary work, do you see a lot of new and different characters, or is it the same character who is a stand-in for the writer? And it's interesting enough, but it's a weakness I think. We are much more self-revealing and less able to produce new people over and over again.

Story has a mind of its own and tells things sometimes it might have preferred us not to know. Stories operate like dreams; both veil what is to be uncovered, neither is capable of the coverup.

I'm always amused by the way questions are asked. "What did you intend?" That's not even a recognizable verb. You don't intend when you write. You sit down and you're thinking things and dreaming things and someone says something and you think "Ah!" That's how it happens. Intention is not part of the game.

I'm bad at thinking about society. I love to make fun of very small aspects. For instance the privacy rules we have in the States. Where you sign this thing that you've never read, and if you ever read it you discover there's no privacy whatsoever. But I don't know how to think sociologically, to tell you the truth. My son is a political scientist and my daughter-in-law is a sociologist. I can't think that way. I am not a good political militant at all. I keep thinking about what the other side must look like.

I've often tried to describe how memory works. I've suggested this to students, and told them to close their eyes and try to remember what I look like. Then I ask them if they remember what I look like. But when you open your eyes you will be surprised how different what you thought I looked like is to what I actually look like. Because the imagination is a different raw material from actual vision. Memory is very different from the thing itself.