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

I have never thought that I have sacrificed anything being a writer. That might not be true, maybe I have sacrificed something. Maybe I've given something up, but I can't think of it.

I'm just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.

I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.

This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.