I'm Always Telling Myself As I Write

I Take Real People And Put Them In Extraordinary Situations.

There Is Very Little That Is Accidental In My Work. I Believe In Serendipity For Developments Of Plot, But The Actual Writing Is Arrived At By Very Hard Work. The Joy Of Writing Doesn't Mean That You Don't Get The Backaches And Headaches And The Days When It's Not Coming.

The Earliest Influence On Me Was The Movies Of The Thirties When I Was Growing Up. Those Were Stories. If You Look At Them Now, You See The Development Of Character And The Twists Of Plot; But Essentially They Told Stories. My Mother Didn't Go To The Movies Because Of A Religious Promise She Made Early In Her Life, And I Used To Go To Movies And Come Home And Tell Her The Plots Of Those Old Warner Brothers/james Cagney Movies, The Old Romantic Love Stories. Through These Movies That Had Real Characters, I Absorbed Drama, Sense Of Pacing, And Plot.

I Am Frightened By Today's World, Terrified By It. I Think That Comes Out In The Books. I'm Afraid Of Big Things. Some Of These Schools Have Three Thousand Kids, And Even The Size Of The Schools Frightens Me. Big Government Frightens Me; So Does Big Defense.

It Came To Me That Hell Would Not Be Fire And Smoke After All But Arctic, Everything White And Frigid. Hell Would Be Not Anger But Indifference.