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" I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have. "

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" With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes. "

" So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion. "

" I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole. "

" When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things. "

" 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 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. "

" One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are. "

" I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it. "

" No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him. "

" If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions. "

" I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful. I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part. "

" Half my life is an act of revision. "

" I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin. "

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

" Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you. "

" I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey. "

" Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you! "

" Good habits are worth being fanatical about. "

" I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station. "

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

" 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. "