I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

He traveled in order to come home.

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

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.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

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

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.