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.

I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

In a practical sense, pain kept me from sitting down as much, so that sometimes I would have to stand to write. Not that I would necessarily have gotten anywhere anyway. But it definitely set me back to be in so much pain.

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.

You can think everything is dire, but you act as if there's possibility. I see children coming into the world as an expression of this. Sometimes, not always - it can just be somebody that wasn't on the birth control pill or didn't have access to abortion. But I usually see a wanted child as a sign of optimism, and I like that.

I think the major device for me is that narrator's voice. I'm always trying to find a different kind of form to tell whatever story it is, and I wish that weren't so, because it drives me crazy.

Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.