If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end..

I try not to read my own books just because I would rather read somebody else..

One story I've been trying to write for years, and haven't been able to finish, is about a face I saw, just a glimpse of a face, in a max security pr….

Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would b….

I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another..

I revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done..

I'm pretty tight - I rewrite, in some cases, 70 to 80 times before I show it to people..

Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think….

I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event?.

To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or t….

But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't ….

Maybe my work is somewhat divided into family stories, things I know intimately, and then everybody else in the world - the strangers who I am totall….

I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories..

I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that a….

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after..

My first book came out again - the re-issue from 2001. I was rereading it to make sure that I didn't miss any mistakes, and I didn't know who had wri….

I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly beco….

My characters tend to be people who are looking back on a life lived, their joys, their regrets..

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades..

I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around….

As a professor I can't teach writing..