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I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.

I am really into how words sound out loud, so I was always the kid who would, like, read the page of the book to herself in her room over and over and over. And Raymond Carver is great for that. Tobias Wolff is an author who is really good for that as well.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.

What I do is write books for an audience that thinks in a movie language. That's the way I think, and I also believe that not enough authors keep up with the audience.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

I'm a fan of books that are almost languorous in their storytelling. That is a little bit lost sometimes in the modern media that we have.