A person always has a chance to protest this or that.

I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.

…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. " "What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.

I don't start with an idea or concept in the sense that I flesh out an idea or concept and set it at the center of something.

Much of my work has been done in first person.