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.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

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.

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.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.