Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

We are the stories we tell ourselves

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere