My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

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.

Discovery is the joy.

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.

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

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