The claim made by Team Obama that every dollar in stimulus translates into a dollar-and-a-half in growth is economic fiction. The costs of stimulus reduce future growth. No country has ever spent itself to prosperity. The price of stimulus has to be paid sometime.

I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining but are also I hope well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.

When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something it hasn't happened anymore.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book' but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me because in my view fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

Life is a very orderly thing but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

I have more freedom when I write fiction but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one is conveyed better in this form.

Fiction is such a world of freedom it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly they can fly.

More than fantasy or even science fiction Ray Bradbury wrote horror and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence or to be optimistic or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

They should hold themselves absolutely upon the immovable foundation of truth and nature whereby alone they can save themselves from misapprehensions and from the danger of being entirely carried away from reality into mere dreams and fictions.

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college getting an entry level magazine job at 21 working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine.

I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

Because at bottom I'm interested in fear and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction where you can enter people's heads.

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But you know I mean the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean the real story is actually probably pretty boring right? I mean we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction you can change what's crushing you.

As man sows so shall he reap. In works of fiction such men are sometimes converted. More often in real life they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.