I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States.

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.