 But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know. |
| I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. |
| 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. |
| I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. |
| I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there. |
| I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. |
| Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel. |
| The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens. |
| 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. |
| Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy. |
| 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. |
| Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality. |
| 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. |
| Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
