I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.

Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.

Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.

Maybe we're stuck with who we are.

I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.

If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.

It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.