I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

I can remember saying again and again and again, "A terrible thing has happened, but this should be a kind of wake-up call for our country, and we have a great opportunity now to reinvent ourselves. To rethink our position about oil and energy, to rethink our relationship with other cultures and other countries, and why other people want to attack us."

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation.

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

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.