I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

It became inescapable that as conservatives were wrong about people of color, they were also wrong about women. They were wrong about gay people. The only individual freedoms they seemed to get exercised about were the freedom to make a profit and the freedom to own a gun.

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.