We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.

The regional tags are often pejorative and dismissive. Don't think of place-bound stories, in other words, but of stories with a strong sense of place.

Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.

I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else.

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.