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All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.

It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.

In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.

Our pasts so many times determine the value of what is happening today. Everybody is midway in their story.