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.

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.

Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.

Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.

There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.