But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do..

Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette ….

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in ….

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano..

Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live f….

Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature..

Carmen prayed hard. She prayed while standing near the priest in hopes it would give her request extra credibility. What she prayed for was nothing. ….

If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, sa….

In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant..

Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life..

[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapp….

Fiction is always really a labor..

I have seven step-siblings from my mother's second and third marriages. My degree of closeness to my step-siblings varies among the seven but I have ….

This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this..