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Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.

I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.

Everything I do, I do with reckless abandon.