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 and practice - by work.

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 …

The trick of creating character is to try to see all people, even unsympathetic ones, without projecting one's own personality and values on them.

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…

Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ, The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.