One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at and sometimes a bit lower to type.

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

I don't like it when I see my books sold cheaply.

So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.

Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here.

Some of my first memories are waiting for my father to finish his day at work in the University of Washington library and come out and jump in the car with my mom and myself, and we'd be sitting there reading books, and then we'd go home.

After a sound public education, I attended Penn and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After being drafted into the military and studying Indonesian, I emerged as a writer, not a painter.