After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willing to do it, but the Bush administration took a kind of simplistic, almost moronic approach to it, all because people were so afraid.

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

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.