We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

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 think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.

Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.

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

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.

This is true in other fields, too, that a legal aid lawyer gets a whole lot less money than a Hollywood lawyer who handles the estates of celebrities. Maybe the legal aid lawyer is doing something better, though, and maybe they're happier. It's not a completely unheard of idea, but I do think we have to remind ourselves at times to look for satisfaction in other ways.