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" My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better. "

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" Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway. "

" My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.' "

" When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences. "

" Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. "

" Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially. "

" I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. "

" When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you. "

" The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle. "

" I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks. "

" Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. "

" I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. "

" The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. "

" Movies are too literal. "

" I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer. "

" I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist. "

" History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. "

" Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have. "

" Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink. "

" There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. "

" A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to. "

" My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out. "

" I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation. "

" It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. "

" We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy. "

" I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it. "

" When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. "

" The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. "

" I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them. "

" A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework. "

" I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page. "