I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.

You need the art in order to love the life.

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

True, the name of the product wasn't so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time - worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft's Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful.

Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.