To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.