“It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.”

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.

Discovery is the joy.

So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings.

To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive.

Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

So, it’s nice but I wouldn’t want to go into something feeing like I needed to prove that I was good enough to be there.

As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.

That said, there’s a lot of bad telly, but there’s also a lot of very high quality that is something I’d be much more proud of than a mediocre film.

I would ask my parents something, but then go to my siblings. We were encouraged to bounce ideas off everyone.

It’s when I’m literally completely consumed by the story-telling and the actor or actress is evoking something in me.

Money is just something to be circulated.

Being an artist is more of a mindset, a way of seeing things; it is no longer so much about producing something.

Please leave me something…even one memory would be enough.