At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices.

Well, I think it’s extraordinarily fun to write, and I look forward to it every day, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s easy. There’s a difference between the two. It’s fun in the way all worthwhile things are fun – there’s difficulty attached to it. I think that a writer has to accept a certain amount of frustration. It’s inherent in the task, and you have to simply persevere. It’s part of the definition of the work.

I'm not an urban person.

I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

Fiction is socially meaningful.