It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering.

I must love big novels, because that's what I've written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

The characters write the plot. Their natures do.

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.