When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.
From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.
My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.
There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.
Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.
If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.
I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.
I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.
I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.
Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.
