“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.

Your body’s made to run, to walk, to trek long distances and carry things, work in a forest, and hunt animals. You have to keep it alive to function.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

You keep me at a distance when all I want to have you is close.

They say eyes don’t lie, but I mistook the distance in your eyes for depth.

Billy wanted me to stay a safe distance from the most important person in my life. It turned out that his concern was, in the end, unnecessary. I was all too safe now.

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

Because sometimes the value lasts only as long as the distance does.