I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.