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The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.

One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.

I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing.

In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.

No one knows why books do well.

It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories.

Fame is a problem of perspective.

I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important.

In medical school, you're taught to write in this convoluted, Latinate way. I knew the vocabulary as well as anyone, but I would write kidney instead of nephric. I insisted on using English.

I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?

I like certain people's work better than my own.

It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there.

Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live.

What's more interesting than the arc of lives?

'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.

I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance.

If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.

No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.

I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

Families tend to artificially divide the world, imbuing one member with all the attributes and another with all the faults. But it's never that way.

When I write, I can become this ecstatic, crazy fellow, hearing the voices and just loosening up and letting them grow.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.

People are surprised when Hollywood characters act the way a real person would.

When you're in medicine - especially when you're a resident in a public hospital - you feel like you're doing your part. But not when you're a writer.

Writers of literature make very little money.

In the winter, I read next to a wood-burning stove. In the summer, we have a place up in Michigan where I like to read in a hammock. It's almost entirely hidden by cedar trees and right up by the water. You can climb in there and see nothing but water and be seen by nobody. It's perfect.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'

I like to write about the moment of light in the hour of darkness.

Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.

I really enjoy the immediacy of the 'knife and gun clubs,' as they're so callously called. Emergency is a great place to learn about people.

There has always been a tension in my life between the romantic and the practical. I can't hole myself up in a cabin and write down ideas for the rest of my life. I also need to be able to clean out a dog bite.

Every time I'd sing or play piano when I was a child, my dad would yell up from the basement, 'That's B-flat!'

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

I have a very bad memory. I can't remember my own life very well.

Fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition, small disappointed hope.

Your first book is kind of a labor of ignorance. You don't realize the difficulty of it. Your second book is sort of a labor of fear. Then you sort of either hit a stride, or you don't.

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