It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore.

My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.

If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.