Robert Boswell quotes:

We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.

Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

Ideology is the light that creates darkness.

Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

Every man has a day in his life when nobody can defeat him.

Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.

What was your life anyway but the tiny black spot of what you've done against the infinite white of possibility?

Writing is such a solitary thing, so its nice, when Im discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.