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

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.

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

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.

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.

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