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

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

I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.

I believe that if a man does a job as well as a woman, he should be paid as much.

Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand.

You really should not do this job unless you're willing to put in that enormous amount of effort. You should not do the job unless you're willing to take risks. And you shouldn't do the job unless you're willing to lose the job, too.

In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.

If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.

Even if I don't have a job, I work on plays and scenes.

In the middle of a recession no tax increase is justified because it kills jobs, and any tax increase is a job-killing measure and should be defeated.

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

Well, I think that those of us in public life that are trying to do a good job, and that are faced with this popular new game that the media has of being critical of everything that anybody in public office does probably are thin-skinned.