Chance plays a powerful role in every life - our brains and personalities are just chemical soup, after all; a few drops here or there matter enormously - but consequences often become more serious as income levels go down.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.

When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.

America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.