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A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I'm writing about New York.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

To write a story about New York that only deals with people in your age and socioeconomic bracket, that feels dishonest to me. So much of New York comes from everyone bumping into each other.

Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.

I spend a lot of time writing in New York.

I write about people who are usually damaged or neglected by society finding each other and forming relationships that are quite extraordinary and in some cases life-saving. I've had a few of those relationships, which I value highly.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

I know some writers can write on the road, but I'm not one of them.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.