Novelist

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.

Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.

I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about - and I'm thinking about it all the time, but I'm not really inside it, inside the writing.

I wish I had more time to write.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.

Divinity. That's what I'm trying to get at, in everything I write.

I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about - and I'm thinking about it all the time, but I'm not really inside it, inside the writing.

I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.

It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had been her mother's confidante.

I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.

I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.

Divinity. That's what I'm trying to get at, in everything I write.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.