Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.

The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being

I'm not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

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