I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time