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

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

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with.

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

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.