Little children are all writers.

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.

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.

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.

Even murderers, I suppose, experience the loss of car keys the way the rest of us do. I mean, how can they not? Once you make this person scramble around the house looking for her car keys and finally find them, get in the car, and run into traffic, we can identify with her enough that when she stops the car and pulls the gun out of her purse and heads in to kill somebody, we'll be with her as much as is possible.

Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.

Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.