But I never listen to music while I'm writing.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.