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.

Well. I don't suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can't.

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

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 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.

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