Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.

If you're going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won't be interesting to the reader.

I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.

I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children.

I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.