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.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.