. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.