So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I have travelled a good deal in Concord.

People will become what you think of them. See them for their beauty and they will rise up. See them for their darkness, and they will fall.

I'm a laugher and a lover of comedy.

He lay face down, listening to the silence. He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself.

I'm a woman who likes to be courted - strongly.

I'm just paid to do whatever I want to do. Some of the time it's development, and some of the time it's just goofing off.

Hand fits giving, so do it, that's what the Gospel said to me. Life fits living, so let your judgments go.

Acting is not a profession of competing with other actors, but rather a vocation of sharing with fellow human beings.

The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him.