My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.