I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children.

How quickly a person in pain whom you can't help becomes a reproach. And then, no doubt, a thorn.

I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children.

I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.

If you're going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won't be interesting to the reader.

I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.