My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.

I can be glib and truthful all at once.

I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

I just have this feeling that if it weren't for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer.

I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.