There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it’s certainly present in the early work.
I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.
Well, one hopes that if you’re really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.
I get up around 6:30. I work from about 8:00 to 1:00, take a break for lunch, work again until about 5:00, and then go for a long walk and have dinner. Then, if my wife and I have no previous plans, we decide what to do for the evening.
It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.
Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.
Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world – Freudian psychoanalytic theory.
I’m not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.
I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare – let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore – it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.
But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.