I never have a thematic intention at the outset.

And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like.

The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution.

I've never seen novels as built things. I have a tendency to see them as found things so that I always feel a little bit like an archaeologist who's working to get some fragile fossil out of the ground. And the more you get out unbroken, the better you succeed.

So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.