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

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

To the extent that I've ever understood postmodernism - and I'm sure there are people out there who do, but I'm not one of them - one of its distinguishing traits is the story's awareness of its own artifice, and how that awareness becomes part of the story. And if that's right, then I have no idea how I ever got lumped into postmodernism except that I believe, since I was first published, people just haven't quite known where else to put me.

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

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

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.