 I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is. |
| By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets. |
| People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny. |
| What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation. |
| Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me. |
| I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell. |
| Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes. |
| You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth. |
| If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to. |
| Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that. |
| What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I'm not simply taking dictation. |
| I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me. |
| I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them. |
| I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked? |
| I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry. |
| I can be glib and truthful all at once. |
