I'm not sure if guys are supposed to read Vanity Fair. I feel very metrosexual with it but am not sure it's in my comfort zone.

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.