Author's Background Quotes

I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.

I didn't write a ton before 'After,' to be honest.

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

Many of my books are set in New Jersey because that's where I was born and raised. I lived there until my kids finished elementary school. Then we moved to New Mexico, the setting for 'Tiger Eyes.'

I never really wanted to be a writer. I know it sounds strange, but I honestly believe that I didn't pick the story; the story has picked me. I've written absolutely no fiction before 'The Immortals of Meluha.' Not even a short story in school - absolutely nothing.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.

Before I wrote 'God's War,' I probably did eight years of research into the Middle East, Judaism, Islam, Catholicisim, and all sorts of fabulous other things.

My mother would like me to start all interviews by stating that she and my father are perfectly normal. They are proud of me, and as perplexed as anyone by my novels.

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

I've probably read more bad science fiction than anyone else alive. But I've also read more good science fiction than anyone else alive.

I came from a family of incredible storytellers, but I didn't start writing children's books until I was 41 years old.

When people ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was, better still, a weird little kid, and though I would never choose to give my own children this particular preparation for life, there are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

I'm a neurotic New York Jew by birth. Creating characters is second nature to me.

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.

It's always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him.

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

As science-fiction was what I read in college, it was natural that I should be tempted to write it. So I did, and continued to do so, even while I was co-authoring mysteries with my husband Evan.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.