There was a sense that there was a lot of word of mouth happening with 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter,' even in hardcover.

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

The way we behave, our views and outlooks really have their sources some place. They come from somewhere. Sometimes we don't even know what they are, and yet they're very powerful in our lives.

Perhaps it's time to stop analyzing Sarah Palin as a politician. Maybe, in her own muddled way, she is at last owning up to the fact that she has been miscast. You don't need politics anymore once you've discovered that the alchemy of celebrity has turned you into a 24-carat phenomenon.

A year is an eternity in politics - though less than a moment in history.

I used to play with model trains when I was a kid, and then I used to study history.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.