My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me….

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more r….

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're ….

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't..

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. ….

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it w….

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out..

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness..

I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whol….

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff..

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?.

I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imaginat….

WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the H….

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one..

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, ….

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines..

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die..

Travel definitely affects me as a writer..

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever..

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to sp….

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new a….