The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.