Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love noir, quite obviously.
I'm such a first-person writer.
I lived in Florida until I was 22.
America loves a good comeback story!
Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me.
I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them.
Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent.
I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.
I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom.
Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.
I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'
The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.
I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.
The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present.
Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write.
Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there.
We're all trying to figure out on a daily basis what kind of person to be, aren't we? I am, at least.
I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.
With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.
To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.
Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent.
In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina.
In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.
Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.
I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.
Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health.
For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions.
When I'm between projects, I keep a journal I call a 'thought log,' and it's my practice to write down whatever interests me.
Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy.
In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.
The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life.
Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions.
I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal.
As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.
I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male.
I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.
I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.
A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.
Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre.
I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become a way of avoiding life.
It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.
I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model.
I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality.
When I'm absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I've drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another.
Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited.
Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways - as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic.
I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.
When I'm working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way.
When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.
Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.