The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now tha…

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading a…

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writ…

We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It i…

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.