Occasionally.. .what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.