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

To me, point of view is everything.

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

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'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never set out to be a published writer.