I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you.

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs.