On novels versus short stories:

“Once a decade I have an idea that needs the wider, longer canvas of the novel. I like keeping company with the protagonists of my novels. The characters in a short story are assembled in a more temporary way and I don’t think much about them afterward. But the heroine of a novel can linger with you.”

On fiction:

I don’t tend to write characters who have my biography. There has been some overlap here and there, but not a lot. One works, I suppose, a little like an actress.

On writing:

I work from images in my mind’s eye and let the associations occur. Then I try to get the rhythm of the sentence right.

Read the complete interview here.

photo by Andy Manis for The New York Times via

On inspiration:

“In part, writing for me is a call-and-response proposition. I often read something and then write as a kind of response…By response I don’t mean point-for-point, but those stories called up something in me, and perhaps my story wouldn’t have come into being if I hadn’t read the others first.”

“I like the aftermath of the big event more than I like to portray the event itself.”

On her style:

“I’m just not wordy. I am in life, but I’m not on the page. The kind of revision I do is fine-tuning, it’s tightening, it’s dispatching a metaphor and getting one that’s closer to what I mean.”

On writing:

“Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason. There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I’m not one of them.”

Read the interview here.

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