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.

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.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

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

When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.