“To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive.”

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.

Discovery is the joy.

So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings.

Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

I try to cast really good actors and give them a chance to do their very best work, give them as much time and space as they need.

I think my chances of ever making it into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame are about as good as Milli Vanilli’s.

We’re not willing to give black leaders second chances because, in most cases, we’re not willing to give them first chances.

Whereas if I wrote a movie script, chances are better than even that I’d just be another guy in L.A. with a movie script in his drawer.

I see the holidays as a chance for kids to learn self-sufficiency.

Louis Pasteur, the great scientist, said “chance favours the prepared mind”, which is a posh way of saying ‘do your homework’, but it’s an excellent piece of advice.

It certainly is gravy every day above ground right now, after kicking that heroin habit.

I really do see it as the start of the second half of my career.