Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

I never have a thematic intention at the outset. The story informs the theme for me rather than the other way around. But as it happens... this is, at least to a degree, about getting old and the rapid passage of our lives.

We all have a tendency to want order in our lives. But order presupposes authority, and authority presupposes, sooner or later, that we'll all need hooves. It's going to happen sooner or later, isn't it? You know it is.

You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.

She looks like the type that might freak out. It's something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I'll shoot yours.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.