“Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.”

“A novel has to entertain -- that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.”

“I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.”

“A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone--it's still some real thing. It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want.”

“Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see it in your mind’s eye and smell it with your mind’s nose! But forming these images from the printed page is a skill you have to develop when you’re fairly young, I think, or else it’s very difficult to read for pleasure later on.”

“It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.”

“But life could not be lived between the pages of a romance novel.”