The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.

I think everybody must be aware that this society is a whole lot shakier now than it was before the war. I was trying to examine, in 'Dog Soldiers,' the process of that blow falling on America

It's all about letting the story take over.