Obviously cheap sentimentality isn't something any good novelist wants to traffic in, but I think it's a problem if you consider it to be the most egregious of all creative sins. I think it's a problem if you consider it the thing to be avoided at all cost. I think it's a problem of you're not willing to risk the consequences of that kind of emotionalism under any circumstances. Then you wind up in the cul-de-sac of irony.

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

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.

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.

One of the basic philosophical tenets of conservatism - which says that the more power devolves from the federal government to the states, the greater individual freedom grows - is just flatly contradicted by crucial junctures in the country's life, most conspicuously in the 1860s and 1960s, when it's been the federal government that's interceded against the states to secure individual freedom.

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

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.