Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.

Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.