You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.

In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.

When we're good, we're very, very good, and when we're bad, we're horrid. This is not news, because we're so much more inventive and we have two hands, the left and the right. That is how we think. It's all over our literature, and it's all over the way we arrange archetypes, the good version, the bad version, the god, the devil, the Abel, the Cain, you name it. We arrange things in pairs like that because we know about ourselves.

Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.