I've never seen novels as built things. I have a tendency to see them as found things so that I always feel a little bit like an archaeologist who's working to get some fragile fossil out of the ground. And the more you get out unbroken, the better you succeed.

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions.

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 can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

You’d be surprised what a person can live with,” Dan said.