It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.