Eight minutes past the hour here in Belgium - and presumably eight minutes past the hour everywhere in the world.
I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.
I'm trying to inform people, so I try to present them with accurate information.
Forget about someone's resume or how they present themselves at a party. Can they blog or not? The blog doesn't lie.
The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.
I'm not an elitist. I hate the fashion industry sometimes because it becomes so focused on the elite.
I don't ride the subway. Either I walk, or I take a New York City taxi.
Whenever I'm on a book tour, one of the questions I always get asked is what to wear to various occasions.
I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.
I believe every room speaks, tells you what to do to it. You have to listen to that.
I don't really do a big Saturday supper. I prefer entertaining in the daytime.
The thing I don't like about detective stories is looking for criminals.
What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.
Over the years, I've spent time in Saudi Arabia, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Kenya, among other vacation hotspots.
It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.
Often we don't even know what we think ourselves about people in our lives.
I read a lot of 'Nancy Drew' books as a kid and considered myself a bit of an amateur detective.
You won't make a living writing until you learn to write when you don't want to.
Of the paperbacks that you see at the airport, I am the most violent woman writer.
There is no such thing as absolute value in this world. You can only estimate what a thing is worth to you.
I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant - it no longer existed.
