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 and repercussions of the act through time.

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

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

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.

I'm not so interested in the act of murder as in the echoes and repercussions of the act, and how they play out over time.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know wh…

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if asha…