I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

Fiction that intends to be something other than entertainment has a certain obligation, I think, to convince the reader, every time, that what is to be evoked - character, experience, idea - is worthy of his or her consideration, intellectual energy, close attention.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.