I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

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.

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

I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.