Author

'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.

No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.

To me, point of view is everything.

There has always been a tension in my life between the romantic and the practical. I can't hole myself up in a cabin and write down ideas for the rest of my life. I also need to be able to clean out a dog bite.

I still don't know whether I know how to write a sentence.

If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.

It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.

I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.

In the winter, I read next to a wood-burning stove. In the summer, we have a place up in Michigan where I like to read in a hammock. It's almost entirely hidden by cedar trees and right up by the water. You can climb in there and see nothing but water and be seen by nobody. It's perfect.

The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.

Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.

Mathematicians don't like it when they're associated with mental illness and sort of bristle when you say that they can't get along socially, that they're not good with people.

I never set out to be a published writer.

Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

I like certain people's work better than my own.

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

I like medicine. Even if I was selling a million books a year, I would still be a doctor.