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.

I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.

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.

Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.

The short story can't really hold an interesting event. It can't hold a death or a war or a loss of great magnitude the way either a long story or a novel can.

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.