I think that sense of surprise, that you don't know where something is going, or what's going to happen, even as you write, that you're making it up as you go along - that's important to me. It's not a question of shock or surprise in a gimmicky way. It's that as you read, you become more deeply into something and into what happens, and become more involved and engaged, you're learning something or you're appreciating something or seeing something differently - that's what's surprising.

I learned to write from reading. I had no writing classes. It's part of my thinking as the writer-author, reading, but then I also want to bring this into my characters, who also read and think. There's that great quote from Virginia Woolf - it's very simple: "...books continue each other." I think when you're a writer, you're also, hopefully, a reader, and you're bringing those earlier works into your work.

People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don't have the money. There are always differences among differences.

Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.

I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.

Now that I am conscious of the world of chronic pain, when I see somebody walking down the street who's having trouble, I feel a sadness for them. I notice.

I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct.