A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

The issue of torture, connected to American soldiers, is not somewhere most people want to linger. We may not want to confront this issue so much in the U.S. because of how we want to think about our veterans. There's the sense that we want to think of our veterans as - if they're damaged, damaged by something glamorous, like a firefight.