What moves you most in a work of literature?

Language as the well of image and feeling. Nabokov rather than Hemingway. If less is more, it is nevertheless also loss. And the easy vernacular is deprivation.

How do you organize your books?

See reply to Question 1. (Groan.)

What book might people be surprised to find in your collection?

The 13th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1926, essentially a duplicate of the fabled 11th), acquired by my mother before I was born. Its science is obsolete, its histories and biographies are mainly not, and the whole is literary gold, much of it written by luminaries identified only by their initials.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

Make that books most treasured, all but one garnered in childhood. From one uncle, Kipling’s “Just So Stories,” with a gilt Indian swastika on the cover and Kipling’s own ingenious illustrations. From a second uncle, a fat orange-bright “Don Quixote,” so seductive that to skip school I faked a sore throat to keep on reading. From a third uncle, the three-volume Modern Library Giant Shakespeare. From my brother, “Tom Sawyer” and “Alice in Wonderland.” From my mother (who loved it in her own childhood), “Pollyanna.” And from a high school classmate already nostalgic for lost youth, A. E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad.”

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

Hero: Rickie Elliot, the sympathetic central figure of “The Longest Journey,” E. M. Forster’s 1907 novel, which begins in the enchanted Arcadia of young Cambridge philosophers and falls into heartless disillusion. Antihero: Saul Bellow’s feckless nudnik Herzog, with his lofty erudite arguments and his grinding personal grievances.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

See above; but add, it goes without saying, “Little Women.” What embryo writer (barring Norman Mailer types) has not been enthralled by the early professional achievement of Jo March? Coming recently upon John Matteson’s engaging annotated edition, I was captured once again by the passage that had carried me away so long ago: “ ‘The Duke’s Daughter’ paid the butcher’s bill, ‘A Phantom Hand’ put down a new carpet, and ‘The Curse of the Coventrys’ proved the blessing of the Marches in the way of groceries and gowns” — all of it denigrated by Professor Bhaer, that goody-goody Pollyanna who denies human lust and outrage. What would he say of Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater”? And why should Jo have married such a dunce?

Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?

“Trust,” my first and longest novel. It has been judged unreadable, which is more than likely; but I continue to believe that I have never since written with such ardent confidence in the power and worth of the Word.