Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop!

Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn't stand the news, I knew that if the missile were launched, mortality would arrive in half an hour, so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling that I was 30 minutes from being dead.

My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.

A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.

When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.

Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.