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

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.

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

People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.

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.

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.