I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I. As if I were pushing away my experiences from the experiences of others. Because basically what I was trying to do was show our commonality. I mean to say, in the very ordinariness of what I recount I think perhaps the reader will find resonances with his or her own life.

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth

You find the book in the process of doing it. That's the adventure of the job.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.