Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.