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

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

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.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

A real diamond is never perfect.