I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.