When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

We moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1979, when I was five. The funny thing is that, even though Baltimore had one of the top murder rates in the country in those days, I grew up hearing about how dangerous New York was.

Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they're causing, and they will not stop until they've run the world economy off a cliff.

You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If Id listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.