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A book is a book is a book.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'