Hungry Ears Are Sharp Ones.

I'm A Natural Novelist. I'm Interested In The Person And The Group, And How They Mesh. And One Of The Ways I Don't Want Them To Mesh Is For The Person To Be Subsumed Into The Group.

A Reader's Tastes Are Peculiar. Choosing Books To Read Is Like Making Your Way Down A Remote And Winding Path. Your Stops On That Path Are Always Idiosyncratic. One Book Leads To Another And Another The Way One Thought Leads To Another And Another. My Type Of Reader Is The Sort Who Burrows Through The Stacks In The Bookstore Or The Library (or The Web Site — Stacks Are Stacks), Yielding To Impulse And Instinct.

Novelists Of A Conservative Or More Purely Aesthetic Bent Hold Up Better On The Surface, But Their Novels Go In And Out Of Fashion According To Relevance Or Irrelevance.

As Soon As You Bring Up Money, I Notice, Conversation Gets Sociological, Then Political, Then Moral.

Novelists Never Have To Footnote.