People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

I'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

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.

A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.