People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Most of my friends' fathers had been in the war - either as soldiers or in some other capacity in the military. Whereas my father had not fought. He was older and he was in a business that was considered essential to the wartime effort - the wire business - and, of course, I was so young I didn't understand any of this.

I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

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.