If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

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

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.

Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.

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.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

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.