I used to worry about money and career and what was going to happen. How was I gonna succeed or fail in the world? And I thought about it enough that I'm no longer worried about it. I'm not... I don't worry about what's gonna happen in my life. I don't worry about telling me about dying, my own mortality. That's a given.

Lawyer even sounds like liar.

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.

The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

When you deal with a person who's experiencing dementia, you can see where they're struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they're trying to remember.