Little children are all writers.

Little children are all writers.

I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.

I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.

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.

Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.

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.