Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force.

I have never been much of a researcher

Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.

"Unputdownable" is, I suppose, something we all dream of, maybe without knowing it. I realized, some time ago, that a novel can hold a lot, and it made sense that this one was not of the sleek and economical variety, but instead the "full" type. Novel as piñata. And the reader does the whacking. I had a central idea, which is to look at what happens to talent over time.