Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.

Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.

When I'm filling notebooks I'm trying to pin down what I'm really interested in and to find those details that are so hard to come by, details that I can look at and believe are right on the mark. Things which bring a novel to life. They can take a while to come.

Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't avoid being involved with a book, caring about it, even if it's not a particularly good book. You're in it, and you're committed to it.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives.

Normally, what you’re envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels … almost nonexistent things.