With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

You have a new role: family caregiver. It's a role nobody applies for. You don't expect it. You won't be prepared. You probably won't even identify yourself as a caregiver.

My family didn't want me to be a musician, and therefore, they never helped out in my efforts.

My generation's parents told their children, 'Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.' But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that's hard to outsource, hard to automate.

We are on the road 250-280 days a year at least, and it's something that, if I have a wife and kids at home, I don't know if I could do it.