When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.