I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

Sometimes, despite the fact that you're reading through masses of material, you just can't not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific.