The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.

It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.

One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

That certain snobbery of certainly the Parisian - combined with a complete denial of your historical legacy, is just awful. That's a funny thing about France. Saul Bellow wrote somewhere that he saw right through the French. He lived there. He wrote The Adventures of Augie March in Paris, and there's no one better than him to say what's unbearable about the French.