Susan Rebecca White has a keen sense for how her characters talk and think. An impressive debut.

Of course I'd sometimes have characters from downstate living upstate, but it took a while for me to start writing about where I grew up.

When I teach, I try to assign writers from whom I can learn.

I'll write about California someday, I imagine, but I don't know when.

I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.

I believe that we can access stories, and voices from those around us, more easily often than from our own imperfect memories.

I think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa.

I tend to listen to my friends and family empathetically, and I try to help work through their problems from the inside. I try to adopt their thinking.

I think the voice can carry a story.

I'm always relearning things I thought I'd learned for good a while back.

I'm suspicious of epiphanies, because they so rarely last.

To appreciate pleasure some had to experience pain

The oak tree is inside the acorn seed, but the acorn seed will never become the oak tree unless it is willing to grow and develop

All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.

Every language has influences and is an influence.

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.

When thousands of people discover that their story is also someone else's story, they have the chance to write a new story together.

As long as I know my head's in the right place, my feet are on the ground, I think I'll be fine.

Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.

In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best.