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.

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.

Fiction creating reality.

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth