As a writer, I don't think it's my responsibility to make a point. I just write and hope there's someone who'll like it.

I feel like I sort of missed the eighties. At the time, we didn’t know we were having fun, which is probably the way it always is.

As a writer, I don't think it's my responsibility to make a point. I just write and hope there's someone who'll like it.

I think it's true about people now being closer to their parents, since the '60s, really. The parents are no longer from a different planet, the 1950s ideas of American family. We could be friends with our parents. After the '60s, it wasn't like a person smoking pot was what the parents would be appalled at.

Whether I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it becomes progressively harder to get them published - nevertheless, it's what I do, every day.

Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.

I don't want my novel to be like Madame Bovary, finely crafted with the life edited out of it. I want my novel to be like a friend telling me a story -- so we go off on thoughts; that's the way it is.