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I may not have written the stories that I've written if I hadn't ended up in Niverville. I don't know; I don't know. How can you know?

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.

I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.

I do think that the abiding mystery of my origins has definitely had a profound effect upon my writing. There is that thing in the back of my mind where I think I don't really know who I am. And it may make it a little easier to shift around in my narrative voice.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

Wherever a writer grew up, they're obviously influenced by that area, and I'm sure their characters are pulled from those experiences.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.

My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.