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I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.

Even now I try to make each page compelling for the readers to get absorbed in the book.

When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.

It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.

I always like to entertain, first of all, and if the readers take anything away from it that helps them with their own lives, well then, that is a bonus.

I think the greatest reward you get as a writer is finding that people who are reasonably receptive and intelligent have liked your book.

When a new book comes out or becomes accessible in whatever form, I get it and I read it.

Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.