We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.