When we think of the myth of the settling of the West, this is our creation myth. But because we think of it as mythology, not as real people interacting with other real people, we ignore the cost of human lives and blood.

After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.

At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.

When you hold things back, when you don't commit completely to your ideas and trust completely in your own instincts, you are guaranteeing your own failure -- even if you end up having commercial success.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

Cornell changed my life; getting in there was one of my pinnacle moments.

You don't make a decision about being a writer. There was a point, aged 21, when it became clear that this is who I am. The choice is how good you are going to be at it and how hard you are going to work.

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

I couldn't understand what was important about school. Dropping out was the first adult decision I made. If I ever have kids, I would hate for them to drop out. But I wasn't a rebel. I never cared to be against school. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do.

I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel -- and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre.

I should say that generally I'm a pretty happy person, but as soon as I'm done with a project, I'm usually not happy at all. I feel a little empty and strange. I begin to think about how I can get better, stretch more artistically and intellectually. My biggest worry is getting complacent.

I was a bit of a delinquent growing up, a very poor student -- I nearly failed several grades before dropping out of high school and getting a G.E.D. But I still read a lot. Thrillers and war novels, mostly, along with the occasional literary novel from my parents' bookshelf.

Since I quit banking, all my major life decisions, when they could, have revolved around writing.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

Follow your footprints long enough and they will turn into those of a beast.

I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries -- steel, textile, shipbuilding.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they're causing, and they will not stop until they've run the world economy off a cliff.

Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.