In high school, I had a teacher there who was really great to me and with whom I finally dared to admit I wanted to be a writer myself, and we did a ….

I hesitate to say yes - I had writer's block, because I know there are people who've had really serious cases of it, and I've never been paralyzed li….

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it..

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop..

The Postman Always Rings Twice that's a book that I think every writer should read - that has to do with technique. But it's also a novel narrated by….

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures..

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on th….

Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all ….

One of my favorite pieces of advice about being a writer came from a very formative teacher I had as an undergraduate, named John Hersey. On our last….

You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind..

Kenneth Branagh. There was a time in my life when people would tell me constantly that I look like him. I could do a lot worse than that..

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people..

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author..

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in….

I worry that's what people are going to think about me if they kind of go backwards. But if that didn't happen to you, I'll feel better..

Another big moment in terms of that feeling was David Petraeus: if the director of the CIA can't get away with having a secret relationship, then wha….

You see that in the news constantly; done both the right way and the wrong way. The most recent example I can think of, obviously, is Lance Armstrong….

Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming f….

I don't want to make it sound too much like I'm telling people how to read the book A Thousand Pardons, but what Ben Armstead is doing, he's doing mo….

I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a y….

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell ….