I am religious in the sense that I believe in God and I believe that there is an abiding logical spirit that controls what goes on to a certain extent.

Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me.

On the subject of love at first sight, I’m with the Beatles: I believe that it happens all the time.

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom.

The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel' and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.

All Thing Serve the Beam