To Fear Is One Thing. To Let

The Challenge For Those Of Us Who Care About Our Faith And About A Hurting World Is To Tell Stories Which Will Carry The Words Of Grace And Hope In Their Bones And Sinews And Not Wear Them Like Fancy Dress.

A Great Novel Is A Kind Of Conversion Experience. We Come Away From It Changed.

A Novel Is Not Born Of A Single Idea. The Stories I've Tried To Write From One Idea, No Matter How Terrific An Idea, Have Sputtered Out And Died By Chapter Three. For Me, Novels Have Invariably Come From A Complex Of Ideas That In The Beginning Seemed To Bear No Relation To Each Other, But In The Unconscious Began Mysteriously To Merge And Grow. Ideas For A Novel Are Like The Strong Guy Lines Of A Spider Web. Without Them The Silken Web Cannot Be Spun.

Trouble Can Always Be Borne When It Is Shared.

When My Husband Died, People Kept Telling Me Not To Cry. People Kept Trying To Help Me To Forget. But I Didn't Want To Forget. [...] So I Realize, That If It's Hard For Me, How Much Harder It Must Be For You.