I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.

I’m not sure whay I’ve been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

My novels aren’t really generated by a single conceptual spark; it’s more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one’s range as a writer, one’s technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.

Children – if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children – children lie all the time.

The Little Friend is a long book. It’s also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to – I mean, writing is a lonely business.

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there’s no need for secrecy.

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

There’s an expectation these days that novels – like any other consumer product – should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn’t. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice – by work.

I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

I think it’s hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

But it’s for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.

Character, to me, is the life’s blood of fiction.

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you’re trying to work out.

I really do work in solitude.

It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens.

The books I loved in childhood – the first loves – I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

I’d rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

So I’m not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

You are – all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one’s put into it.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that’s a hard lesson of reality.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Children have very sharp powers of observation – probably sharper than adults – yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they’re learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.