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.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.