A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think abo….

It's always the case for writers that when there are limitations, you have the opportunity for your creativity really to blossom and to become deeper….

It's very difficult, I think for most writers, to carve out the time and the kind of imaginative space to do the writing that you really want to do a….

I think about the collaboration between writers and readers, but I also think about the collaboration between all the writers in a generation or in a….

Tom, my husband, who converted to Judaism when we got married, and as a consequence, we were learning about historical conversions to Judaism. Really….

Teaching and writing, really, they support and nourish each other, and they foster good thinking. Because when you show up in the classroom, you may ….

I do think that the idea of writer's block can be very self-defeating for most writers because it's taking a lot of things that are not only real pro….

[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a ….

Time is finite and the demands of the imagination and also the demands of the world are infinite, so sort of brokering some kind of agreement between….

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't k….

A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one..

Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe….

Teaching is enormously satisfying because I'm constantly learning more. Just constantly being exposed to new voices and new life experiences and new ….

I tend to think of writing as a more collaborative project than I think some people do..

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing..

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future..

I may be the person who put "dieselpunk" into the conversation. I have always been a reader who reads in a really broad way. I read genre writers and….

We [me and husband ] had been learning about the Khazars, and I had read Michael Chabon's novel [Gentlemen of the Road] the year before, so all these….

As I continue to teach, I have more to offer my students, and as I continue to teach, I have more to learn from my students. I do know some writers w….

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that..

I think that whether you've just begun writing or whether you've been writing for fifty years - I mean, I'm excited to get there and tell you about i….