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.

I don't have the courage not to write all the time.

We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.

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

Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.

I just like doing it, I like writing.

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.