If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

Discovery is the joy.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we've chosen to govern ourselves.