There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."

I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, "That's interesting." But I don't know what to make of it.

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.