Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall'.

... you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words - so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that.

I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers.

I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.

Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is.

Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.