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.

[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.

Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life, there are no memories without place. You are always situated somewhere. I think the imagination - the narrative imagination at least - situates you in a specific space when you start to think of a story. I often use places I know. I put my characters inside rooms and houses that I'm familiar with - sometimes the houses of my parents or grandparents or previous apartments I've lived in.

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.

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.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself