“I’ve found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person.”

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I’m reviewing a book or doing research.

Well. I don’t suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can’t.

So from the first novel I’ve been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don’t try to protect them in ways that aren’t good for the story.

How quickly a person in pain whom you can’t help becomes a reproach. And then, no doubt, a thorn.

If you’re going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won’t be interesting to the reader.

Distance is a great promoter of admiration.

The Pride of ancestry increases in the ratio of distance.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

It’s late at night and I can’t sleep.

I love to believe that there’s one god but there’s many different religions so there’s just the question of which long distance company you pick.

If you’ve never stared off into the distance, then your life is a shame.

People tend to keep their distance.

For one who knows me, I am one with him; for one who wants to know me, I am very near to him; and for one who does not know me, I am a beggar before him.