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.

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 were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

The proper study of mankind is books.

I have written about 10 books, all just practical encouragement for moms.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.