Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.

I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.

I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.

This is my job, my livelihood: the health and the well-being of the publishing industry. We're all responsible for this.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.