The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.

I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.