I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.