You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.

If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.