There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

The trick of creating character is to try to see all people, even unsympathetic ones, without projecting one's own personality and values on them.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading a…

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have r…

You can't argue with facts and figures. Either people want it, in which case they pay for it, or it's two guys sitting around at the Plaza having a discussion,…