If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we've chosen to govern ourselves.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about. You try not to because it's hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest. So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.