Much as I love stories, I think I'll only be satisfied with myself as a writer if I'm able to produce a novel that feels publishable. The books that truly take me away - for weeks at a time - are all novels.

I'm going to proportion more time to organizing and taking action and less time to passively consuming news that is dispiriting me. Part of this will be to get off social media. I know social media is just a tool, but we've been using it in a way that has transformed us from a nation into an audience, passively spectating our own ruin.

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

Authors should be as involved with the marketing of their books as they want to be. No more, no less. I happen to recognized, quite early on, that no one was going to buy my book if I didn't do everything I could to let them know that the book existed.

Football offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas "wars."

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

Capitalism doesn't consider morality. It considers profitability.