Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.

I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.