Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story.

I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.

The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.

Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.