Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

I don't want to be taken to Bhutan and smell the flowers. I want to be told something I couldn't have been told any other way.

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.