Personal observation is as important as what has happened to you, how you look at things, and how things get stored up over time. I don’t worry about autobiography in my work anymore. The longer I write, the less I care where it comes from.—Pam Durban, interviewed by Cheryl Reid
I changed the tense many, many times. I changed the narrative perspective many times. It took me a long time to hit the rhythm of that. I think during the initial writing that the writer’s telling the story to him or herself. And you tell the storoy wrong in the beginning many, many times.—Roy Parvin
If you stick too closely to your own experience, you have a built-in ceiling to that story. It’s not going to go anywhere, or it’s not going to go as far as it could.—Daniel Wallace