The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.

As many times as I've seen 'The Merchant of Venice,' I always take Shylock's side. For all the hatred that guy is shown, he has a reason to hate in return. He's treated cruelly. And it's tragic that he learns to be intolerant because of what others do to him.

I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

I suppose I try to look for those things where the world turns on you. It's every automobile accident, every accident at a party, you're having a good time until suddenly you're not.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

I had a particular affinity for wrestling, and it did have a lot to do with being small and being combative - and being angry. And when you're small and you don't back down, you get in a lot of fights.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

I've learned how to sleep on airplanes. When I'm taking a trans-Atlantic flight or going to a different continent, I will always read because reading puts me to sleep. When you watch a movie, you have all that light coming to your eyes, but with reading, I can't get through 15 or 20 pages.

Sometimes I think the easiest way to introduce what goes into managing the expenses of a tennis career is to take a look at another pro sport and notice some of the differences.

My expenses are largely a fixed, sunken cost, regardless of how much revenue I earn.

Usually I'm traveling for tennis, so the most important thing for me is to not get jet lag.

I want to be a top-10 player and I want to win a Grand Slam tournament.

A tournament pays me to show up because the fans want to see me and I move the needle at the box office? That's amazing. It's good for tennis, good for me and good for the event. If a sponsor wants to pay to put their company name on my shirt because they think I'm a strong ambassador for their brand? Heck yes.

I felt a ton of pressure in '08. A lot of great things were expected of me right out of the gate, and I brought some of that on myself with those great early results. But I wasn't a good enough player to make a run every fourth or fifth tournament. I wasn't as good a player as my ranking indicated.

Up until I was a junior at Georgia, I felt that when all was said and done, I'd at least have a college degree to fall back on when tennis was finished.

You're going to lose points and gain points throughout the year.

That's why I enjoy Davis Cup, and I really enjoyed college tennis. It's very special. You want to go out there and compete your hardest, because you don't want to let anyone down. You want to absolutely give it your all for your team. And that's sort of the mentality I've taken to pro tennis.

I've sort of always pulled for the heels, like the bad guys. So I think if I were a pro wrestler, first I'd need to bulk up, and second I'll need to get sort of a bad-boy persona.

The good wins are still great, and you are on cloud nine when that happens, but the losses sting.

As a tennis player, or any professional athlete, our career has a shelf life. I don't want to waste any opportunities, I don't want to look back on it when I'm 45 and think I could have done a lot more.

Nothing against the Olympics. I played in 2012 and it was an incredible experience. It's different for tennis players than for swimmers and track and field athletes. That's the pinnacle of their sport and not so much the pinnacle of tennis.

For many years, tennis was the most important thing in my life. That was great. Nothing wrong with that.

I think the more matches that I play, the better shape I'm going to get in. That's the best type of fitness you can do.

I always have to play very aggressive on the court. It's something that's easier said than done.