I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don’t have a lot of sympathy for because I’m just going to be with them too long.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They’re about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren’t necessarily about that.

I’m delighted by how Nobody’s Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I’m finished with a theme, I’m generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don’t have a lot of sympathy for because I’m just going to be with them too long.

It’s no secret that in my books I’m trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what’s funny in the joke.

HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they’re odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that’s the end. Here’s another who’s never going to write well again.

I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don’t make things funny.

Usually by the time I finish a book tour I’ve just about had it with the book.

I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

If there’s an enduring theme in my work, it’s probably the effects of class on American life.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that’s what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They’ll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters’ thoughts with great understanding and depth.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

I read pretty voraciously. If it’s good, I don’t care what it is.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don’t have to go looking for it.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don’t mean to.

I don’t think there’s a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I’ve got other stories to tell.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don’t write, or take notes. And I certainly don’t begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody’s fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it’s almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it’s because I really don’t know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.

What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I’m not simply taking dictation.

I can be glib and truthful all at once.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It’s always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren’t any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you’d be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.