Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.

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

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

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