A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.