I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

If you're a smart writer, you listen.

In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.

The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

It wouldn't have occurred to me that while this old white man, which is to say me, was voting for Hillary Clinton, white women were choosing an overt misogynist [Donald Trump] over the first woman president. Someone will have to explain that one to me someday.

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

While a particularly deft sense of irony may be one of the tools of great storytellers, I think it's also true that if irony serves as a retreat from an emotional engagement that you're overly concerned is uncool, that's a failure of nerve.