If I have managed to brighten up even one gloomy childhood – then I’m satisfied.
There's nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you're trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.
The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.
I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.
There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
We suffer by our proximity. [Who get a blow intended for another. ]
I always read everything on the desks of people I went to see in Moscow, London, Paris I found it quite useful.
I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests. ' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news, but in hindsight, I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.
Time and experience have taught me a priceless lesson: Any child you take for your own becomes your own if you give of yourself to that child. I have born two children and had seven others by adoption, and they are all my children, equally beloved and precious.