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

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

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.

Mathematicians don't like it when they're associated with mental illness and sort of bristle when you say that they can't get along socially, that they're not good with people.

Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.

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.'