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" The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. "

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" I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones. "

" Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent. "

" Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand. "

" Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction. "

" But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work. "

" The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out. "

" So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter. "

" But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know. "

" I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for. "

" Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time. "

" I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. "

" There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years. "

" I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. "

" To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone. "

" Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy. "

" You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it. "

" The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work. "

" The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences. "

" Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life. "

" Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive. "

" I really do work in solitude. "

" I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. "

" On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business. "

" I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories. "

" Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties. "

" When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain. "

" Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality. "

" Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device. "

" I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. "

" It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens. "