Quote

I do a lot of writing about my family.

I write about families. That is who we are.

Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.

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

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

I'm a family-based person, even though we didn't exactly have a very happy family. I was never in any doubt that this was a centre of writing.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.