Novelist

Our imaginations are strong as children. Sometimes they get shoved aside, these imaginations. They get dusty and mildewed with age. The imagination is a muscle that has to be put to use or it shrivels.

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.

What does it mean to be Catholic and not a Catholic? I feel adrift, homeless. My Catholic imagination allows me to see the soul as a lit breath, seeking the divine. It persists.

Red Sox fans have been pushed to the brink over the years, but that's how faith grows stronger.

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.'

Writers are socially observant. We find people endlessly fascinating, and real life is mysterious. Sometimes it's hard to stop staring at the strut and squawk of my fellow man. They can be quite inspiring. Sometimes it's hard to stop talking to them to see what in the world they're thinking.

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

I prefer a cluttered workspace.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

Writers aren't born properly labeled so it is hard to know one when one appears.

I write across genres so I see them, more often, as complementary instead of separated by boundaries.

Don't shame the young for releasing their pent-up fear.

I'm a woman, but I've been a sexist, too.

I am politically pro-choice, but personally pro-life. I have my faith but refuse to force it on the world at large - especially this world, so brutal and unjust. I cannot make these wrenching personal life and death decisions for others - nor do I believe they should be made by a church run by childless men.

I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

The truth is that for those 86 long years when the Red Sox went without a World Series win, fans were not only in a recession, but trapped in a longstanding, deeply entrenched sports depression.