The Internet and all its lures are much, much harder than anything I've ever encountered. If you're writing on a computer, the very instrument you're writing on is already tainted by the world out there in all its permutations.

I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.

We are tyrannized by our options.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.

When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.