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, 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 …

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one'…

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

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

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

People talk about talent as though it were some neutral substance that can be applied to anything. But talent is narrow and only functions with a very few subj…