When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.