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" I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour. "

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" When I feel like being a director, I write a novel. "

" I had a particular affinity for wrestling, and it did have a lot to do with being small and being combative - and being angry. And when you're small and you don't back down, you get in a lot of fights. "

" There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly. "

" I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs. "

" It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them. "

" I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography. "

" You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. "

" I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual. "

" I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin. "

" I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open. "

" Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. "

" There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep. "

" When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed. "

" I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him. "

" My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons. "

" If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life. "

" I have a very poor record at multiple choice questions. "

" The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of. "

" Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue. "

" If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product. "

" I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read. "

" I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story. "

" To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense. "

" As many times as I've seen 'The Merchant of Venice,' I always take Shylock's side. For all the hatred that guy is shown, he has a reason to hate in return. He's treated cruelly. And it's tragic that he learns to be intolerant because of what others do to him. "

" You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one. "

" The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was. "

" I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with. "

" I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them. "

" Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is. "

" I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter. "