Doing nothing, badly.

I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.

You cannot love without intuition.

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.