It's very important to distinguish between innocence and naivete. The innocent do not deserve to be the victims of violence. But only the naive refuse to think about the origins of violence and to pursue the possibility that the genesis of that hatred could be addressed.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.