I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel - and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.

I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding.

I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.

If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there isn't much room for anything else.

The mosque was the neighbourhood house of worship, but it was also the place where my high school friends and I came to study.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.