I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.

It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you're from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength.

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

The main thing a childhood in the Church did for me, I think, was set up the universe as a moral system. Once you've seen it that way, it always seems that way.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it.

That's one of the reasons I take a lot of consolation in fiction. You have years to work on it. I think that allows you to reach for the best part of your reader instead of a lot of the internet stuff, in which you're kind of reaching for the worst or the most shallow part of your reader.