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.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

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.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.

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.