I am sure every writer has this and probably every newscaster, that people are always coming up to me and saying, my daughter wants to do what you do, my godson, my tennis partner.

If I had problems, I kept them to myself. I didn't make a scene.

reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.

I think of Nashville as a very natural place. We're easy going, we are ourselves. There isn't a lot of preening or trying to impress. So it's an easy place to just be and that is a good state from which to write.

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. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and 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.