 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. |
| But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work. |
| Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life. |
| I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. |
| 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. |
