Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.