I Used To Sit Home With My

God Bless Interlibrary Loan. I Pay A Lot Of Library Fines. In The Case Of 'a Single Shard,' I Was Using Books That Hadn't Been Checked Out In 30 Years, So I Didn't Feel Too Bad.

I Want All My Books To Provoke Some Kind Of Response In The Reader, To Make Them Think Something Or Feel Something Or Both, And For That To Become A Part Of Them And Work Into Their Own Lives.

With A Book Called 'keeping Score,' I Really Did Want To Write A Book About The Korean War, Because I Felt That It Is The Least Understood War In The American Cultural Imagination. So I Set Out With The Idea That Americans Didn't Know Much About The Korean War And That I Was Going To Try To Fix A Tiny Bit Of That.

I Can Give Advice To Anyone Interested In Writing In One Word: Read! I Think It's Much More Important To Be A Reader Than To Be A Writer!

I Often Have Trouble Falling Asleep At Night, So When I'm Lying In Bed I Think Up Stories. That's Where I Do A Lot Of My Thinking. I Also Get A Lot Of Ideas While I'm Reading - Sometimes Reading Someone Else's Stories Will Make Me Think Of One Of My Own.