So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.

Sadness is simply something to be treated with antidepressant meds and otherwise need not be spoken of.