I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal..

I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck..

That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile….

As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of ….

Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good ….

I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me somethin….

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruc….

That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal te….

I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia….

In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with a….

If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boa….

I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding hor….

I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world..

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good..

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction..

I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death..

Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor..

That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my ….

After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was ….

My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness..