You Learn A Lot, Writing Fiction.

We Open Our Mouths And Out Flow Words Whose Ancestries We Do Not Even Know. We Are Walking Lexicons. In A Single Sentence Of Idle Chatter We Preserve Latin, Anglo-saxon, Norse: We Carry A Museum Inside Our Heads, Each Day We Commemorate Peoples Of Whom We Have Never Heard.

Forever, Reading Has Been Central, The Necessary Fix, The Support System. Her Life Has Been Informed By Reading. She Has Read Not Just For Distraction, Sustenance, To Pass The Time, But She Has Read In A State Of Primal Innocence, Reading For Enlightenment, For Instruction, Even. ... She Is As Much A Product Of What She Has Read As Of The Way In Which She Has Lived; She Is Like Millions Of Others Built By Books, For Whom Books Are An Essential Foodstuff, Who Could Starve Without.

I Can Remember The Lush Spring Excitement Of Language In Childhood. Sitting In Church, Rolling It Around My Mouth Like Marbles--tabernacle And Pharisee And Parable, Tresspass And Babylon And Covenant.

The Present Hardly Exists, After All-it Becomes The Past Even As It Happens. A Tricky Medium, Time - And Central To The Concerns Of Fiction.

I'm Intrigued By The Way In Which Physical Appearance Can Often Direct A Person's Life; Things Happen Differently For A Beautiful Woman Than For A Plain One.