Working 14 hours a day until you're 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

First, people don't read novels off screens, and they don't have a tendency to shell out real money for books when they don't retain anything physically for their money.

Every time I get a lot of money, I cry, and I got a lot of tears left.

Perhaps storytellers don't need to care as much about the future as executives and investors do. After all, isn't it possible that technology will enable storytellers to connect directly to their audience without the need for anyone to share the programming decisions or the profit in between? Don't bet on it.

The Internet seems to have killed American fashion in the sense that everybody has good style, but they also look vaguely the same.