If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

so my grandmother was not without humanity. and if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in the garden, they were cocktail dresses she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. even in her rose garden she did not want to appear underdressed. if the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. when my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, "what? and have those people at the cleaners what i was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?" from my grandmother i learned that logic is relative.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.