Novelist

I answer two or three letters a day. I'm just not the he-has-a-secretary kind of guy.

There is a lot of my childhood in 'The Sandcastle Girls.'

Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.

People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read.

My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.

I live here in Vermont, in a village of barely a thousand people halfway up the state's third highest mountain.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

On the one hand, I'm this guy who grew up in the suburbs of New York City to very conservative parents, and the other side of me is fascinated by the peripheries of our culture, maybe because that's where our culture is most in transition and where there's likely to be conflict.

If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.

I need complete silence when I write.

As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?

I do have hobbies - I garden and bike, for example - but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.

On a regular basis if you're trying to produce something, I think you should work every day and set achievable goals.

What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.

The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.

I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try and brand yourself and write one specific kind of book, but to write the kind of books you love to read.

If you are stymied as a writer, if it's just not coming together, then take the pressure off and don't feel that you need to write 1,000 words today; just write one really good sentence.