I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.
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.
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.'
People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.
Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.
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.
I've outlasted many marriages at Random House.
In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
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.
I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.
It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.
If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.
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.
The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.
