Families tend to artificially divide the world, imbuing one member with all the attributes and another with all the faults. But it's never that way.

I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.

I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.

'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.

What's more interesting than the arc of lives?

Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.

It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.

I like certain people's work better than my own.

I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?

I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.

Fame is a problem of perspective.

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

No one knows why books do well.

In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.

I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.

The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.

In the winter, I read next to a wood-burning stove. In the summer, we have a place up in Michigan where I like to read in a hammock. It's almost entirely hidden by cedar trees and right up by the water. You can climb in there and see nothing but water and be seen by nobody. It's perfect.

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

Mathematicians don't like it when they're associated with mental illness and sort of bristle when you say that they can't get along socially, that they're not good with people.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'

You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.