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My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.

The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

A lot of times, the inspiration for a novel is a messy bird's nest of shiny things. Little things that don't make a whole lot of sense or that, no matter how hard you look, cannot be found directly in the finished book.

I think anybody alert to the inspiration to write has to be kind of sensitized to the unexpected.

One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.

I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books.

As a kid, there was a painting of 'Appeal to the Great Spirit' that I would see when I would get oatmeal bowls out of the cupboard. This painting, it was so real to me that it frightened me.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.

There aren't many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called 'Horned Pigeon.' He had been on the run and hadn't eaten for a week, and his description of the cheese fondue he smells in the peasant kitchen of a house in eastern France is unbelievable.