The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

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 Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.