They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover.
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.
It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens.
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’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
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 think it’s hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
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.
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
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.
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.
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.
But it’s for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
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.
Character, to me, is the life’s blood of fiction.
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.