Author

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

When you're in medicine - especially when you're a resident in a public hospital - you feel like you're doing your part. But not when you're a writer.

Writers of literature make very little money.

John Cheever was the first writer I ever read who sort of had that similar sensation that, you know, life is nasty, miserable, brutish and short, but that occasionally, there's a certain river of light, a kind word, a telling gesture that sort of illuminates something.

I'm fascinated by power, by those that can be publicly generous and privately ruthless.

I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.

I was born in Ann Arbor. I lived for a while in Ohio; Pennsylvania, California for 10 years, and now in Boston. And I lived in Iowa for a couple of years, where I studied at the Writers Workshop.

Doubt is the enemy of mania. It's trying to get aloft strung with weights. The moment I like writing is three sentences in, when somehow those weights drop away, and you can invent. I cannot tell you the dread I have.

There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.

Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.

I've discovered over the years that being subject to both the adoration and the vilification actually makes me more disciplined. It makes me understand that it's the idea of writing a great book that propels me now, whereas it used to be the idea of success.

Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.

Every time I'd sing or play piano when I was a child, my dad would yell up from the basement, 'That's B-flat!'

What's more interesting than the arc of lives?

I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

I think one of the things that is essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that's why I spend so much time and agony writing books. But working on carpentry is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony.