Get A Life. A Real

I Never Think About Issues When I'm Working On A Novel. Issues Are Things That Happen To People In Sufficient Numbers To Elicit Widespread Attention; In Other Words, They're Just Life Happening. That's What I Think About: Life, And Telling A Story.

Americans Like Warm Characters. It's Why, No Matter What He Did In The Early Days, They Kind Of Resonated To Bill Clinton Because He Seems Like A Guy That You Could Sit Down And Have A Burger And A Beer With. It's Even Why, Despite The Fact That He Sometimes Seemed To Be Not Firing On All Cylinders, Lots Of Them Still Like George W. Bush - Because He Seemed Like The Kind Of Guy You Could Have A Burger And A Beer With.

Young Men Kill Someone For A Handful Of Coins, Then Are Remorseless, Even Casual: Hey, Man, Things Happen. And Their Parents Nab The Culprit: It Was The City, The Cops, The System, The Crowd, The Music. Anyone But Him. Anyone But Me.

I'm Boggled By The Idea Of Being An Only Child. I Know Nothing At All (i'm Happy To Say) About Having Had A Cold And Withholding Mother, About Being Divorced. The More I've Been Writing Novels, Each Novel I've Written Has Become Successively Less Grounded In Anything Approaching Autobiography.

I Learned To Live Many Years Ago. Something Really, Really Bad Happened To Me, Something That Changed My Life In Ways That, If I Had My Druthers, It Would Never Have Been Changed At All. What I Learned From It Is That Today Seems To Be The Hardest Lesson Of All. I Learned To Love The Journey, Not The Destination. I Learned That It Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, And That Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get. I Learned To Look At All The Good In The World And To Try To Give Some Of It Back Because I Believed In It Completely And Utterly.