In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.