You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.

There are some advantages to being a writer: you do generally get better as you get older. I think I understand things better. When I was a kid, I was kind of guessing at the emotion. Now I'm interested in writing more difficult books, books that confront the facts of life, of death and dying and failure - the majority of life. You write outwardly imaginative books when you're younger. When you're older you apply imagination to internal experience.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.