Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.