There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.

I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.

Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.

I've discovered over the years that being subject to both the adoration and the vilification actually makes me more disciplined. It makes me understand that it's the idea of writing a great book that propels me now, whereas it used to be the idea of success.

I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.

Doubt is the enemy of mania. It's trying to get aloft strung with weights. The moment I like writing is three sentences in, when somehow those weights drop away, and you can invent. I cannot tell you the dread I have.

I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.

Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.

I was born in Ann Arbor. I lived for a while in Ohio; Pennsylvania, California for 10 years, and now in Boston. And I lived in Iowa for a couple of years, where I studied at the Writers Workshop.

It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.

I never set out to be a published writer.

Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when making up stories.

I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.

Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.

I don't want to be movie-star famous. I want to move people with my writing.

It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.

I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.

If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.

When I went for my medical school interview, I had an old paperback of 'Henderson the Rain King' in the pocket of my coat. I was wearing the best clothes I had - a pair of cords and a sport coat - but when I got to the office, all the other interviewees were lined up in their black suits.

I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.

The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.

I think one of the things that is essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that's why I spend so much time and agony writing books. But working on carpentry is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

I started out writing stories because that's all I wanted to read, but now I don't know if I'll ever write one again.

A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.

The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.

The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.

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 teach a 14-week semester, and one of the things I do when I have to teach literature is, for the first half hour of the class, I have the students write the beginning of a new story every week. At the end of the semester, even if they have learned nothing about literature, at least they'll have 14 beginnings that they can take with them.

I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.

To me, point of view is everything.

I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation.

As I write, I try to be the character.