Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.

After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.

I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.

Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.