...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

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

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.