As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately..

Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it's more about losing a sense of family. The horror of that kind of incompleteness….

Most people dont think about race as much as I do. They dont have to..

And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don't in fact communicate so much as leave messages ….

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through tim….

I did feel a little afraid, as you say, the complete liberty and "elasticity" of it. But I found that I liked some of the things that it availed me o….

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know..

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad s….

I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about se….

We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the ni….

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist..

I don't think that stuff is gone - I just don't want to dwell on it. There's a difference. As I said, I think we all have tendencies as writers, and ….

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not..

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday..

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know..

Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the st….

Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels a….

The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determin….

I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work..

For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that pa….

The truth, finally, is who can tell it..