It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?

The only true dead are those who have been forgotten.

You'd better watch where you go, and remember where you've been

I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.

The half-hour before dinner has always been considered as the great ordeal through which the mistress, in giving a dinner-party, will either pass with flying colours, or lose many of her laurels.

Our problems are technical, not political

God's church is not a stage for us to perform on but a garden for us to grow in.

Because of what's going on with the economy, I think women are realizing that maybe they don't need a closet full of clothes. They just need the right clothes.

I'm a Gemini, so I'm very dual. I love something and I hate it at the same time, so that probably comes out in the lyrics.

I believe, whatever God does, he does it for the good. I always try to look at life like that.