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I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

I don't concentrate on any one period of history; I like to locate my stories in wildly different eras and places. I seem to be drawn to large, sprawling, uncomfortable swaths of American history, finding embedded within them a tight narrative that involves strife, heroism, and survival under difficult circumstances.

I have always been obsessed with America, the geography, the history, and, of course, the music. I've been lucky enough to have travelled through the country a lot, and, in a kind of anorak way, I've noted which states I've visited and which ones I've been to most often and all that sort of detail.

My book collection is primarily in America, since that's where I've lived most of my life.

I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.