We all want to fix things. Just as we all believe that so much in life can be rectified. Mend fences, build bridges, reach out, engage in mutual healing.

But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us.

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

Words matter, words have import.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.