When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

I've been in a long and happy relationship for 22 years and it's never inspired me to write anything. It's too good - nothing to say. Problems, conflict, that's what makes for good stories.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

Sometimes, I think there's a lack of ambition in me. But then sometimes, I think, no, you can, like William Blake said, you know, see heaven in a grain of sand. If you look really, really closely at a situation, you can find almost endless interest in it.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

Seriously, I think what all the puzzling over parenthood I had to do to write [a novel] ROOM taught me is that children can thrive in a remarkable range of situations.