It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

Things are not what they seem.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.