Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.