Detroit, my ‘great’ subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am – for better or worse.
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.
Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I’d put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn’t actually know how to write.
You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.
I can’t say I was a very successful sorority girl.
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
Like most people, I can be very easily hurt.
Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.
Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
I am what would be called a ‘mainstream feminist,’ not a radical feminist.
I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Most people who are writers go through periods when they can’t write.