Well, I didn't know any snake-handling ministers.

Well, a novel does acquire a certain kind of richness when you work on it for a long time that can't really be faked.

Well, I'm not interested in murder so much in the aspects of, you know, sleuthing and detection and that sort of thing. I'm much more interested in the echoes …

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

''Write what you know' is a tautology. You have no choice -- you have to write what you know, and in order to write something new, you have to learn something …

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which sim…

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.