Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.