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.

A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?

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.

I learned to love stories by listening to them.

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.