Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.

I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.

A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.

She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.