I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.

Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.