All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page.