In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.

It's easier to write about a place sometimes when you've left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place.

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.

Writing a story, you understand, is not done by consensus. But we do learn from each other, and we remind ourselves how important this work we're doing is.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.