Say you're an American novelist, published by the largest publishing house in the world. Their goal is to make as much money from you as possible, to have as many people read your book in as many formats as possible. How can you hope to speak intimately to the numbers of people that represent the book sales required?

Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.

I've never been able to shake the idea of family, which is to say I've never been able to shake my family. Being membered - being one limb of an immense grosser body - that's always been a fact to me.

All of business and all of politics is essentially fiction to those who live them. I have more experience with fiction than most senators because I do it all day, so their world didn't seem that foreign to me.

My earliest memory is making peach cobbler with my grandmother. A wonderful memory. I grew up in a restaurant family - B.B.Q. restaurant.

Some of the most important conversations I've ever had occurred at my family's dinner table.

In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child.

The Delmore Brothers is hit music - very, very popular - and it still retains that rural flavor and simplicity. I always think of it as family music, really, because families sang it.