What it was at the time was literally a plea for, to get the pressure off for a while, to give her space to breathe. She was very unhappy. She was feeling pretty claustrophobic.
The only time I've ever taken out a loan is for the building work I had done at our house and I did that by extending the mortgage.
A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.
Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.
There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.
I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.
I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.
Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.
You want to read a book? That requires introspection. It requires time away from people and time away from the constant need to communicate and to connect.
I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.
Every time I went to the doctor when I was in my twenties, he repeated the same thing to me: don't wait too long to have children.
I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We're all creative all of the time, we can't help but be creative.
I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
Every time I am in danger of believing the glamour of my own press, some incident inevitably brings me back to earth.
Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.
It's time for compassionate Americans to send a wake-up call to their members of Congress and demand passage of legislation to end the wholesale slaughter of America's horses once and for all.
Being a mother is quite tiring. There's not much time to do anything. You just rush around and it's hard work.
When you're a kid, your first five or six years, you converge all the time. School is about training that out of you, especially universities.
I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.
