I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.
I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.
I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.
Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.
I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.
When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.
I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.
I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.