In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.

I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

I really do work in solitude.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice by work

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

We need to begin an all-out diplomatic offensive on Darfur in order to prepare the way for a peacekeeping force that can ensure protection for the people of Darfur.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all. But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident.

I think acting is about forgetting yourself in order to give the best of yourself. It's passing through you more than you're creating it. You're not the flower, but the vase which holds the flower.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself.

I am co-counsel and as co-counsel I have the right to represent myself, speak for myself and conduct myself and my trial by myself in my best interests in order of due process.