Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that.

It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.

I think that we're all always just working on finding how that balance functions for us, given today's circumstances.

A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.

War's a racket. No doubt. But war is a racket for the politicians, not the soldiers.

You are the author of your own destiny

This time I felt my own face redden. Talking with this woman was like sitting still for a series of slaps, delivered arhythmically so you couldn't know when the next one was coming.

An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.

I haven't always done a good job, and I haven't always been successful - but I know that I have tried.

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

I do first draft in longhand, which saves a lot of rewriting. I try to get a certain amount done each day. Don't always, but I try. Then I clean up in the rewrites.

I want to be the best leadoff hitter of our time.

A good disposition is a virtue in itself, and it is lasting; the burden of the years cannot depress it, and love that is founded on it endures to the end.