This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.