I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.

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.

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.