We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.

There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.