A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.