Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.

I have written my whole life. I remember writing as a small child.

It's a very good thing to teach kids to finish what they started in the sense of fulfilling their commitments. So when my daughter told me on the second track meet that she was done with it because she discovered she didn't like competing, I made her finish the season.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

If you aren't talking to your kids about socialism, someone else is. So use car time, dinner time, tax preparation time, and time spent together at your work or small business to teach your child about the virtues of capitalism, the system of government that has lifted more people out of poverty.

I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn't speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, 'What? That's your son.'