Written words still have the amazing power to bring out the best and worst of human nature

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.