It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.

I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.

Little children are all writers.

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.

We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.