It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.
If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.
I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?
'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.
I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.
'Wild at Heart' created a set of expectations maybe, partly, on my part, certainly on my publisher's part, but also in the world out there, that my next books would be as remarkable.
You're always told by your publisher that you must only write one book a year and some years you should perhaps write none at all.
My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.
You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.
If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye.
With 'The Angel's Game', there was a lot of pressure from the expectations - expectations from the book industry and from readers; it's natural.
