I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.
I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.
Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.
What's more interesting than the arc of lives?
'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.
I have a very bad memory. I can't remember my own life very well.
Medicine ended up being the best thing I ever did for my writing.
There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.
I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.
I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.
No one knows why books do well.
It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.
Fame is a problem of perspective.
I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.
I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?
I like certain people's work better than my own.
It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.
I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.
If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.
No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.
I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.
When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.
A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.
When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.
People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.
Writers of literature make very little money.
Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.
I can only remember two books from college that moved me E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'
I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.
Every time I'd sing or play piano when I was a child, my dad would yell up from the basement, 'That's B-flat!'
