Writer

Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That's why I keep a journal - not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it's like your gold mine when you start writing.

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.

I had a concussion I didn't get over for three years. I think that's why I'm goofy.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

My favorite thing is just walking in the woods. I can do it for days on end without tiring of it.

Between the two dream coasts, we're just called flyover country... If you aren't known as an amorphous Eastern Seaboard writer, you're dismissed as a regional author.

Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.

I've always been very much attracted to a character that's actually free.

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.

I work every morning, all morning, sometimes in the afternoons. Then sometimes I hunt in the afternoons - quail, doves, grouse up north - but just to stay alive, because writers die from their lifestyle but also from their lack of movement.

The big curse of America, to me, is skinless, boneless chicken breasts. They're banal and relatively flavorless. The rest of the world's trying to get some fat to eat, and we're trying to ban it from our diet.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.

I can write anywhere.

Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It's irrelevant.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.